The workshop thing was actually required in order for using large workshops not to be a nightmare though. If you have a power saw, for instance, it can currently only makes planks and maybe 1 or 2 other things, but can do them in large batches. The carpentry bench could make basically everything but very slowly. If we didn't make recipes per-module, if you had both in one workshop and a workbench finished a job a hair before a power saw, it might decide to take a job to make planks that the power saw really ought to be doing, and you lose a TON of efficiency off of things you can't really control. This does give players a little bit more gardening to do but honestly it's not inherently a bad thing to motivate a little interaction as long as the choices aren't always the same. If you're always building the same thing you can just build a few modules in the workshop, set minimum orders, and leave it there.
It does however
cause lost efficiency as well, or an excessive amount of player fiddling with buttons.
Let us say I have a carpentry workshop with 4 stations.
My goal is to build 10 cots and 10 cabinets.
For cots I need planks. For cabinets I need bricabrac (sp?)
I could set the jobs as follows:
Station 1: Make planks up to 20 (aka always keep 20 planks)
Station 2: Make bricabrac up to 5 (aka always keep 5 bricabrac)
Station 3: Make 10 cabinets
Station 4: Make 10 cots
In this setup, suppose I have 3 workers in the work gang and I start with nothing but raw wood.
What happens?
One guy starts to make planks while everyone sits around, right? Well that's not good. That is 3 person's labour not getting done. Once a few planks are made, either some bricabrac or some cots get made. Either way it trickles through slowly. Not very sensible BUT it would get done eventually without me checking on it again. This is important because there is often a lot going on and remembering to juggle fiddly production orders over and over is tedious and demands a lot of attention
Instead I could do some calculations and discover I need (just as an example, I haven't looked at the numbers closely) 40 planks total. Well I could set each station to make 10 planks. It goes faster, but now I have to remember to check back when they've finished. And what if I also have a building (kitchen) pending that also needs planks? I need to remember to go adjust it upwards a bit and spread it over the 4 workstations. And once they've finished, I need to go set up jobs for bricabrac, then for cots, then for cabinets. Nowhere can I simply queue what I want and leave it, ala Dwarf Fortress's job manager wherein I can say "Make me 40 planks, make me 20 beds, make me 12 bookshelves, etc" and it handles the rest. In DF I can restrict a workshop's availability by profiles, saying "I only want this masonry shop making blocks while that one is available for furniture" and then no matter how many blocks or furniture I queue up, I know the blocks will only be produced in the block-restricted workshop (which is further restricted to allow only my shitty mason because quality is unimportant for blocks) while furniture is only made from my second workshop which only allows my grand master mason because he makes good stone chairs.
Perhaps the ability to group workshop modules together and establish a shared queue might work for this implementation?
In your example with the powersaw, allow the powersaw its own queue wherein I can tell it to keep me 35 planks and 22 bricabrac (or whatever) while the other 3 carpentry modules share a separate queue where I can put furniture and other boxed modules?
Basically the lack of a queue is kind of a killer for anything but very small batches, and any 'standing' production orders are a waste of a workstation because once fulfilled that workstation will never be used for anything else. I could just build more, sure, but now I'm being forced to be wasteful just for efficiently using my workforce or I have to cancel the order and reset it later which is annoying