Hey Greg
Sorry for necro:ing an old thread, but it just kept bothering me to no end… 
The various mixer recipes for dust/small dust + molten glass + molten dye to stained GT glass are the same energy-time for 1x small dust → 1x glass and 1x dust → 4x glass.
And then there’s the colored nether crystals from Netherlicious 3.2.8… shredding an individiual crystal shard (1x shard → 1x fluorite dust) takes double the time/energy of shredding the crystal shard block form (4x shard block → 4x fluorite dust).
And I’m surprised there’s no GT processing recipes for the Netherlicious Crystal Clusters/Crystal Buds that grow everywhere in the nether. You have to use the crafting recipes to get shards which you then can properly crush or shred…