So, madtulip's ship mod has a concept called "tilesets". The concept is very simple: You place a bunch of blocks, then place a tilesetter object to smooth them out into a line, slowly and ineffeciently breaking and re-placing them as other material types. I made my own. It makes the block itself be a Lua-scripted object which decides how to orient things at the moment you place it, and can do both the pipe system of the original as well as build larger pictures out of smaller blocks. With no additional objects or tools required whatsoever -- Just place it and it's magically perfect. I'm just not sure what to do with it, is all.
Well, from my point i'd love it if all blocks ( some exceptions like dirt maybe) had this kind of behaviour, especially when it comes to backgrondmaterials, as long as they automatically fill up the space within a lets say 3 x 3 block completely instead of having those mini squares between the tiles like it is at the moment with madtulips mod.