I take it back, don't get J.U.L.I.A. -- there is a game breaking bug just beyond the 2 hour mark that has apparently been in the game for at least 4 months (if not longer). The last game patch was in January (5+ months ago) and there appear to be no efforts in progress to resolve the bug.

I also had some thoughts about (in the future) setting up our main bus to assign some combinator logic to control output lanes on a priority-- and setting the priority based on the total lanes input-- so that if our main bus slows down (resource starved) that it will auto-shutoff lower priority goods from consuming stuff from the main bus. (This would go hand-in-hand with manuacturing things locally rather than manuacturing and putting things back on the bus.)

[3] http://i.imgur.com/BupggK8 - this is half the middle belt balancer from the previous image-- according to comments on reddit, like the left balancer from the previous picture it is not lane-perfect for balancing which is why the creator inversed the belt path (mirrored it) to generate a perfect balancing layout-- the point of the previous picture is to show that 2x his is still shorter than 2x the other -- even tho 1x the other is smaller than 1x his. I'm sure you can figure out the problem that occurs if you have 2 belts in (full) and 2 belts out (full)-- as that's what the left most image in the previous picture shows.

[2] http://i.imgur.com/4yetA - Three variations on an inline 8:8 belt balancer. Only the middle and right example are 'perfect' for lane balancing. None balance within a specific lane. On that thought, it occurs to me that we should be looking at balancing the resource removal from the belts or balancing at the exit lane. The former is superior for reducing the UPS bleed This is another thought that gives support for the idea of busing only the raw materials and making everything required for a product locally. Like your comments about busing coal instead of plastic, since coal has better compression.

A few finds I thought you might be interested in: [1] http://i.imgur.com/80O5Xe3 -- All Science Packs layout, 1/sec

Great Guide for the Railway!