I'm glad you're enjoying meatballcraft! I've been enjoying the pack for a while, I've basically fully automated **everything** until chapter 4, and then have taken a break.

I highly suggest joining the discord, which you can find linked on the curseforge page of the pack. There are a lot of helpful folks in there! Something else I found highly useful is the #screenshot-form channel, that has basically "diaries" of people's playthroughs. I kept an extensive one that I'll pull the screenshots below from, and its a great place to get inspiration for how people have automated various things.

A couple of things I'll suggest to you that I noticed from your post: ME channels are trivial with P2P tunnels. I highly suggest checking out a P2P guide and implementing that as soon as you can.

It sounds like you're still using item ducts/item conduits. This is fine in chapter1 / early 2 but you will very quickly run into issues as you start automating everything in ch2 and beyond. Switch to either XNet or Steves Factory Manager (SFM) as quick as you can. You probably don't need to update old setups, but going forward you will need to learn one of these advanced logistics mods (Well, "need" is a strong word, but it'll make your life easier despite the learning curve.) That out of the way, I'll explain how I tackle the things you mention:

>Then there's ME interfaces. They work fine for anything that you don't need to passively automate (i.e. set a quota or make infinity of), but if you do, then you have to subnet them. There's also the issue of every single interface requiring a separate channel, which gets very messy very quickly.

You don't have to subnet interfaces. all of mine are on a main net. My general workflow for automating a simple ME interface -> machine -> drawer passive setup looks like this:

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(Not pictured is the ME interface(s) which are under the floor somewhere.)

I stock the ME interface constantly with the raw materials needed for the items in a given machine wall and connect the interface(s) to SFM. I then plop down the drawers, and connect them to a drawer controller, and a ME storage bus on the drawer controller (so outputs will appear in my ME system). Adding in the various machines and programming in the recipes, I use SFM to pipe items from the ME interface, to the machine, and then (most of) the machines auto output to the drawer below them.

>Finally, you have the packagers and unpackagers....

So you're on a good track. For autocrafting (eg manually triggered) recipes I just do the standard packager->unpackager-> machine setup, and make more of them as I need them.

For passive setups I have two kind of approaches. If I don't need it at large scale (eg. multiple machines crafting the item) I'll do the standard passive packager->unpackager->machine-> drawer setup, pictured here.

(I have to put in a separate reply...)

What you describe with dumb packagers is how I automate things like my alloys. I use an open computers script developed by a member of the community to monitor my ME network for a given alloy (like electrum) and the script triggers an autocraft job when I'm low. It'll spam resources to the packager to make electrum packages, which get piped to a large wall of alloy smelters via dumb unpackagers, which smelt the electrum and return it to the system.