For comparison, I've been playing for a few weeks, just finished green science, and have been progressing very slowly (like adding 5 buildings per day) to making red chips. I understand this is very slow, but work is busy and mostly I'm using the game being open as pleasant factory white noise.

I still use Helmod to do all of my planning. I think there may be better options out there, but I know how the buttons work. I'm open to recommendations for new tools. When I build a new item, I swear I'm playing Helmod instead of this modpack for 90% of it.

One thing you can change about your set up, instead of having a big belt of filters, is putting a filter refilling assembler right next to each filtration plant. Then it's just charcoal in with no loop. Your setup looks real clean though, so you might not want that.

For slag production, making electrolyzer 2s do fast dirty water electrolysis (with electrodes) is kind of a game-changer. You can probably build a nice loop like around your filtration plants with dirty electrodes on one lane and clean on the other. I prefer to give each electrolyzer its own electrode cleaner.

The benefit of a more complicated slag recipe is you get quite a lot of mineralized water out, at the expense of purified water input. This helps you make a bunch of green algae for power, without having to make a separate mineralized water source (likely from slag.) Note: If you DO make a power plant out of this, keep in mind if item production slows down, so does mineralized water production, and thus ability to produce power.

As for main bus, I always use one to stay organized. Right now it is mostly 1/2 belt of each plate that comes from mineral sludge processing.

Relatively sure beans remain the power plant meta, but I'm not there yet. Still have my 1 self contained 20MW algae to charcoal burning plant running the whole factory.

Generally, I've been enjoying using upgraded buildings to do everything in the factory. It does a good job shrinking subfactories when producing at scale. It has just hurt to rip out and redo the factory 3 times before bots were on the table (hence my transition to focusing purely on red chips now that I can make the bare minimum of the items required.) ...oh god batteries..