I wonder if there is a forum thread or something along those lines where the devs are made aware of the problems composite icons pose? In my view it should be fairly easy to mitigate any performance impact stacked icons have if on belts, and it should be possible to request a composited picture for further modification in data.raw.
For example in Bob's electronics, the icons for electronic boards are composites and can change their appearance depnding on mod settings, and while I could provide prerendered stacked items, they would look exactly the same as creating them dynamically in game, with the added likelihood of not matching the base icon depending on other mods and settings. On top of that in game rendering doesn't work correctly for composites of composites, which I can't easily fix for Crating.
And to create the stacked / crated icons automatically out of game, I'd have to make the program that does the rendering understand the icon layers syntax in factorio.
I think if a few mod authors would ask nicely, they would at least think about adding support in the game and making all this prerendering unnecessary for most icons. So, as a first step, I thought I'd ask here if this has been discussed before, and if that's something you'd be interested in.
