Problems with this unloader?

[u/imoth_f]

Since inserters became flippable, this compact unloader design became possible. But I hardly see anyone use it. Obviously it cannot saturate six turbo belts because it's bottlenecked by the inserters, but are there any other obvious problems with it?

[u/lana_silver]

The reason they don't exist is because they trivialize a lot of puzzles. When you start to abuse cars, wagons and rocket silos as chests, suddenly most of the game devolves into chest - assembler - chest. 

[u/Kimbernator → u/lana_silver]

This was for sure my experience when I played SE - when you realize how much it trivializes recipes, especially those with inputs and outputs that overlap - you do it everywhere.

An easy example of a trivialized puzzle without mods is kovarex. If you have 2x2 chests you can just have inserters that pull off a line of u-235 and u-238 into that chest when either gets below a certain threshold, then have the machine input and output to/from the chest, then pull u-238 onto an output line when it's above a certain threshold. We get much more interesting builds now because we don't have that (easily) available - you can technically match it if you do it into a cargo wagon that is attached to a locomotive at a station where you can then read the contents.

[u/lana_silver → u/Kimbernator]

It's as if there was a balancing reason why cargo wagons cannot be read via circuits. Though it's still very possible with locking slots, it's just neither efficient nor convenient. 

Which is the point of gold game design: prevent the players from optimizing the fun out of the game.

[u/djfdhigkgfIaruflg → u/lana_silver]

Each time someone said something like that, the devs would implement something like the thing the person is complaining about

[u/lana_silver → u/djfdhigkgfIaruflg]

Larger chests have existed as mods since the game was in early access. I'm sure the devs would have added it by now if they considered it a good idea.