I've noticed that the combinator for setting the recipe also inserts ingredients from the overflow chest.
That's pretty useful because with that a normal 1x1 buffer chest can work for requesting and holding all ingredients, within limitations.

And this is where the problems begin: the overfilling limit for the ingredients is way too high.
As an example, I had it set to a recipe that needed 5 of an item that's rather expensive to make, and just requesting 5 and another 5 after the first batch was inserted would have been fine.
But it kept inserting them until it had over 80 of these... While it only needed 5...

So I'd like to request a setting for limiting how many ingredients based on "x results" get inserted. Having it insert the ingredients for 2 results would've been fine, but 16 is overkill.
Especially because after it switches back the recipe the chest will explode from overfilling.

Except for iron gear wheels filling just 2 cycles means the assembler hardly ever runs.

It should be enough items for "x results" or "N ticks" where N is the update interval of the crafting combinator, whichever is lower. The "x results" should be a config option though so you can programm the combinator with a "item=1" signal without crippling it.