Free orbital drop - cargo pods, seems indeed wasteful and weird so there's need for a fix. But there's problem with automatic cargo drops - there's no control how much is dropped. There's one of requested items on platform? Off he go - one pod wasted. And since pods are no longer free - its a problem.
So does this mod add control for that?

Yes this is pretty annoying. In most cases, I just have a request for more cargo pods in all my ships.

The only REALLY annoying case is your first science drop platform that everyone builds. That design drops 1/2 at a time constantly and eats up cargo pods. My solution was too dumb for words and not reasonable (I made a science ship that flys to vulcansus until it has enough science before returning to navis airspace).

Adding GUI controls is a bit beyond my ability to mod. If someone in the community knew how to do that, and add some control logic, IE only drop if you have at least X of a given unit, I'd be happy to accept pull requests through github.

Perhaps you can check out: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Rocs-Hardcore-Cargo-Drops
it seems to have this capability