I f-ing love these guys. Factorio is such a great game. I've only just started figuring circuits out in earnest, so it's great to see they're still iterating and improving the systems.
Only two circuit channels on radars is rather restrictive. It definitely won't be usable as any kind of grand open bus as I'd like it to be. Perhaps they think that's too overpowered.
At least unlike Space Exploration, the transmitter and receiver buildings are the same, and not specialized only for send/receive. It's also tied directly into a building you'll be making anyway.
It's a pure win on all accounts, just less of a win as I'd have liked.
I didn't compare it to modded content. I just wished for more circuit channels. The fact that at least one mod exists that offers this is irrelevant.
There is very much a noticable feel difference when comparing native engine features and content that sometimes has to awkwardly wrestle around the limitations of the mod API. A first-class feature implementation baked directly into the engine with its own interface is almost always an equally good or strictly superior experience to modded offerings, provided that the features are identical. So, given the opportunity for a feature I desire that a mod provides to become a native feature, I will never not root for that opportunity.
Multiple operations per tick is a trick I learned early in my days of modding. What you do is use the modulo of an operation (for example a 132% completion is equal to 1.32 and its modulo is .32 or 32%) and run normal math on that, while outputting the factor of the whole number. So if you have 30% operations per tick it's just a simple "add 30% to your progress" but if I have something crazy like 810% than I will add 10% to the operation and then add an output equal to the normal output multiplied by 8 and output it that tick.
Put more simply, add the % of progress to your bar, if it's above 100% than divide your progress value by 100 and round down. The result will be amount of times to output the item while the reminder will become your new progress % value. If the process is something that can't be resolved to a simple number (such as pulling from a randomized loot table) than use a loop to run the operation x amounts of time.
The best part about this system is that it also fixes the bug where you have like 99% progress, add 13% and end up at 0% progress.