Are you planning to add compatibility and add-on at the expense of other mods? For example, steel pipes from the K2 mod, both separately and together. Or different pipes from Bob's mods.
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/k2-steel-pipes?from=search
I think you could create a texture mask and repaint new types of pipes using this mask. This will only require working with masks and their overlay, as well as almost a "copy" of the entities themselves in the data phase, although I'm not sure that you could repeat this success in the runtime phase. I think you can do it if you want to do it. I would just be glad to see such an integration, since by adding such parameters, scaling with any type of pipe would be absolutely no problem, I think.
