alt Hacker NewsTrains don't need to be optimal, they just need to be viable. The fun makes them optimal. I think the quality, speed, and belt improvements did enough to return them to this balance (but I have not played, so I can't say myself).
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I agree they’ll be viable. They’re much harder to use but roughly equally good.
Also my late game experience is probably not representative of the phase just after victory where trains may have a slight edge - there could be a sweet spot there where the decoupling is worth it because you can horizontally scale through bottlenecks.
By the end I was using dedicated patches for each science so trains just get in the way.
they are getting better in 2.1. They get bigger and faster with quality, but the biggest win is the ability to direct unload from the landing pad to bigger trains via the new landing pad unloading bay, within a reasonable range of the landing pad.
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For complex recipe graphs beyond vanilla train routing is also way more efficient. You get to reuse the same rail network, and sometimes not have to route dedicated belts for 6 low throuput ingredients from all over the map
I feel like a lot of the challenge in early Pyanodons is place-and-route and belt congestion. Unlocking trains feels amazing. They're definitely optimal for a lot of recipes in that mod I think