There are a couple points that are being missed here:
1. If you start trying to grind up through it in Alpha Sec, you're going to take forever. No shit. I didn't bother with much beyond the initial macerator and electric furnace until I hit Delta, at which point it really took off in my eyes because it gave me things to work toward.
2. @Sean: Did you not bother testing it out before offering an opinion? The core element of it is that you're putting in a lot of effort to build up this resource base, but once you have, the menial tasks in SB are much less painful. I won't deny that's it's really fucking expensive in terms of pixels (I think I've put something like 85,000 pixels into it, and I've not hit the end of the tech tree yet), but the payoff is great. Now that I've done that, I can drop a pile of 500 ore into my hybrid macerator, pull out a stack of 1000 dust a minute or so later, drop that into my hybrid electric furnace, and get out a pile of 1000 ingots in another minute or so. It doubles the output you get per ore, but more importantly, it vastly speeds up the smelting times.
There are also machines that do things like turn iron into steel and titanium into durasteel without using coal, turn petals into stimpacks, etc. They all take time to build up to, but it makes things much smoother. Even though SB is still in beta and the mod is still rough around the edges, it offers a lot of content; of that, it's either stuff that exists to allow you to progress through it, or (this is the final-product stuff) stuff that removes a lot of the tedium from vanilla. More than that, though, it's a good stopgap, because it gives people something to do in endgame beyond showing off in multiplayer or wishing quests were in already.
Really, though, the ironic part of this in my eyes is that people so quickly transition from lambasting the people that want to skip the vanilla grind for being casuals to bashing this mod for being too grindy. That, and the fact that grind added by a mod is somehow bad while grind in vanilla is good, because reasons. Gotta love that hypocracy, eh?