Yes, i know, the mod is abandoned and my suggestions won't change anything, but i'm still writing this because i'm bored, it's almost midnight and, well, because i'm crazy too.

So, first, when doing a recipe, you could do a entity/weapon recipe, or you would also have the choice to make a material recipe, this means you will craft something, wich you will need to craft something else.

Also, making it so we can choose what material to spawn when using the "material" entity would make things easier.
Also making the lootbox work would be good, you could choose the box's model and what materials it may contain.

Now, i'm gonna go deeper into the mod :
You would be able to rename your worktable and change its model, then you could save the worktable, and when placing a new one and you interact with it, you would have the crafting menu (of course) and a option to "load" a worktable, and i don't think i need to explain what it does, but also, when customizing your workbench, you could specify if it needs fuel and what materials it can use as fuel (Could be an ore foundry, indeed, but also a chemistry bench that needs chemicals to work for exemple)

So, then, when making a recipe, you could specify in what workbench the recipe will appear, based of the worktables you've saved.
You could also specify the crafting time of your recipies, and with that, an eventual crafting queue, but that's not necessary.

Make the rock entity better and add a real pickaxe needed to mine the said rock, and maybe a tree entity, wich requires an axe to cut down.

Also, making it so we can craft props would be great too.

My ideas are a bit crazy, i know, and i don't even think all of it is doable, but anyway, it was my pointless impossible to make suggestions.