How many times have you grabbed a Flat Lift, for example, only to find out that you really needed the U-Shaped Lift? I've lost count how many times that or something similar has happened to me.

It would be nice if the two types of Lifts, three types of Connectors, three types of Balancers and two types of Sorters were instead represented as four generic pieces: Lift, Balancer, Connector, Sorter. Each of the four generic pieces would automatically adopt a Flat, U-Shaped or Pipe persona based upon whatever they were first connected to. Place down a Generic Balancer and, if connected to a Flat Conveyor, it would automatically become a Flat Balancer. Likewise if it was instead connected to a Pipe it would become a Pipe Balancer. Of course Generic Lifts and Generic Sorters could only be used with conveyors, not pipes.

Replacing ten specialized Conveyor / Pipe pieces with four generic pieces would reduce the rather large Transport menu from 22 main entries to 14 main entries and players would thus spend less time hunting for the proper variant of a piece and more time building.