I think that the current smelting and smithing proces needs reworking. Currently it takes so much time to smelt ores and nearly the same ammount of time to reheat bars, plates and nuggets. I think that the smelters should be made much more biggers, taking more insert and produce crude bars, that could be refined further.
Smelting should take long, agreed, no objections with that, but waiting same time to just work with metal is a bit annoying.