Given that the proportions desireable for game balance is a very sensible way to build the random components weight table, the difficulty lies more in how to keep the technological gates in place. That is, to ensure low tier materials are available with low tier methods and tools, but high tier materials can only be obtained from high tier methods. – This could be easily handled by using intermediate materials (like Alumina, WO3, TiCl4) as the direct (by-)products of the lower tier process on the ore, that require further processing to retrieve the actual high-tier material from them. --Less easy is the mining tier / hardness question.
I love the idea of semi-randomized materials. Using a variant of one of the name generators for alien cultural places (which want to sound similar) is a nice touch.
Honestly, I’d only play the game-balanced resource world mode in multiplayer, as my friend group includes several people that need to keep a “non-dwarf’s guide to rock” open in another window. 