Scale pipe/belt maintenance with load

Include current utilization % (for example as a fraction of products in the pipes/on the belt to maximum capacity) as a factor lowering active maintenance.
Currently, maintenance of entities, including pipes and belts, has 3 states: active(100%), idle(20%), paused(0).
This is good, but long mostly empty pipes/belts with low utilization count as 100% active, which creates an undesirable incentive to micromanage.
Earliest example is the player's first basic distillery. The pipe to dump waste water has low utilization (15/60=1/4) and depending on the map can be quite long (ideal location of the first distillery is close to coal, which can be far from the shore).
Low-utilization pipe maintenance can be lowered by:
- splitting the pipe into short segments using pipe connectors so only some segments are active at any time (free, undesirable construction ugliness)
- adding a buffer in front of it and only enabling the pipe when it can be 100% utilized (undesirable ongoing micromanagement)

Although pipes can need to be cleared (when pumping crud oil and similar) and can be damaged temperature changes, they are mainly damaged from outside regardless if they contain/transfer something (so rust, loose bolts, accidents). Given how low amount of maintenance they need dynamic maintenance would not make that big change. It would also need changes in the game code and mainly this would need to be added to everything using maintenance, tanking some CPU cost.
It could be nice if there was some research or something to lower maint. consumption of pipes (and belts) permanently.