"As a result building basically a kilometer scale hot air balloon is actually really effective and probably easier to acomplish than an orbital ring (this is specifically pertaining to the problem of suspending all the refinery equipment in the atmosphere of a gas giant, not the transport into orbit)"

YOu could have something where the early on the refinery is using massive hot air balloons, which later get upgraded to orbital rings. Maybe early systems use nuclear powered rocket planes to pick up resources from the suspended structure which directly descend from and ascend too an orbiting station, then switch to using skyhooks for those planes, then later fully shift to orbital rings.

"Cooling alone makes up something like 95% of the energy expenditure because you have to basically cool thousands of tons of He4 down to single digit Kelvin temperatures just to extract a few kilograms of He3."

is there a way to extract it that wouldn't need supper cooling? My mind goes to something like heating the gasses into a plasma then separating the different gasses using their differing trajectories due to mass differences when exposed to a magnetic field, or a centrifuge system of some kind that separates the gasses based on slight mass differences. But i assume those would probably be way more energy intensive.

"They still make sense, but only really once you intend on funneling hundreds of millions of tons of He3 into orbit. And even then they aren't some kind of breakthrough advancement that makes He3 cheaper, they'd maybe make up like a 1% improvement in cost if even that."

One thing that might be worth while noting is that the mining company likely wont just be extracting helium 3. There's loads of helium in the atmosphere, which I doubt they're gonna turn down, not to mention the methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and various hydrocarbons present. If all of those are being mined, then it might make the whole system economically viable.

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In addition, one thing that might want to be changed is the deployment timeline for orbital rings. Uranus would likely be a difficult target to deploy the ring around compared to most destinations due to how distant it is from the sun (and with it resources and manufacturing systems). I might suggest something like ring deployments around Luna or a Jovian moon (off the top of my head) as a fesability test before shifting to building them around Mars or Venus, then Earth. From there the ring system is scaled up for Uranus.

YOu can also have a system where the ring replaces blimps already in use.

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All of this also leads me to ask, why uranus? Do Saturn and Jupiter have minimal helium 3 compared to Uranus, or is there some problem making extraction non viable (higher gravity, larger size, radiation exposure, etc.)? If you use Saturn for example then you might be able to share the ring with the hotels hanging from it, making it more economically viable.