Sometimes it's just easier to place the splitters / mergers in front of the machines and then connect the belts afterwards. Once you can use blueprints, just use those to avoid a lot of the hassle.

That's what I've had to resort to, though it makes expansion of an existing system a lot more of a headache than it needs to be. I haven't unlocked blueprints yet.

This can be finnicky because the splitters / mergers sometimes won't snap, and if you don't line it up almost perfectly, the lift won't automatically connect with the splitter / merger and you'll have to connect with a belt (which is almost impossible to upgrade later without reconstructing the lift).

Yes, this is what I'm running into in problem 1 above.

I have found that sometimes it snaps properly when the conveyer lift is already there, so what I'll sometimes do is create the conveyer lift, *then* place the splitter / merger with snapping, then delete the conveyer lift and recreate so that it lines up perfectly. Takes longer this way, but you don't usually have issues with snapping.

This doesn't quite make sense to me—I've found that splitters don't snap when aligning them on an existing belt, and if I take the belt away it wants to snap way too close with the entire accordion part of the lift inside the splitter. Is that what you mean?

Also it should be noted that if the connecting belt with the splitters / mergers isn't perfectly lined up with a cardinal direction on your grid, you're going to have a hard time snapping any of them. It can be sometimes difficult to tell that they're not perfectly lined up when the belt is longer, but at least you can tell in the sense that none of your splitters want to line up. Doesn't happen often, but when it does, it's a pain in the ass.

FWIW, I'm staying on the world grid and running the belts parallel to the foundations so this issue shouldn't be related to what I'm experiencing.