Ok, this was a day or two ago, but I discovered that the Cable Anchors in AE2, when placed horizontally, can be climbed like ladders. They don't, however, quite entirely function like ladders- if you stop trying to walk into them, you'll fall off instead of descend slowly, and grabbing back on and climbing back up does not negate fall damage.
Also, I've (nearly) finished automating all the vanilla potions on-demand with AE2. All the regular, drinkable potions are craftable on demand in no more than 70 seconds or so (factoring in slow-to-react import buses); infrastructure for splash potions is in place, but not yet configured.
The leftmost brewing stand is constantly supplied with netherwart and water bottles; the level emitter that you can barely see below and behind it only allows the import bus pulling Awkward Potions into the network to run when there are less than 15 of those potions already in the network.
The second stand is constantly supplied with Awkward Potions. The ME Interface above it has recipes like "1x Blaze Powder -> 3x Potion of Strength," and allows the system to make any of the most basic potions with effects (i.e. those that don't need to be corrupted with a fermented spider eye and haven't been strengthened or extended).
The third and fourth stands are constantly supplied with redstone and glowstone, respectively. The Interfaces behind them are configured with recipes like "3x Potion of Strength -> 3x Potion of Strength II." They are only configured to upgrade the uncorrupted potions and the Potion of Weakness- the Interfaces and Import Buses don't have enough slots for this to work any other way.
The fifth stand (immediately to the left of the hopper) is constantly supplied with Fermented Spider Eyes. It is configured in much the same way as the previous two stands, except it has separate recipes for corrupting, say, Healing and Healing II potions into Harming and Harming II potions, respectively. And it has a recipe for turning water bottles into weakness potions, because there's no point in wasting netherwart there.
The final stand (with the hopper and all the cables surrounding it) is constantly supplied with Gunpowder, and (once I've finished configuring it) will have a separate recipe for every single splash potion (with an effect) in the game. There are exactly 28 such potions, which is annoying because the Interfaces and Import Buses in AE2 each have nine slots for crafting or filter patterns. If there were 27 potions, I would only need three of each and not the cables in front of the blocks. But, as it is, I need four interfaces and import buses, which means two more AE2 channels (those colored stripes on the cables, of which normal cables can only carry eight). This, in turn, raises the total channel requirement of the system (excluding an external crafting CPU, terminal, and storage medium) to 25, which is one more than I can supply with three lines of non-dense cables. This is why the Export Bus atop the leftmost brewing stand is attached to the cyan cable, which I had intended to only power the P2P tunnels in the network.
Underneath each brewing stand (and all around the last one) are ME Import Buses configured to import only the potions that that particular stand is designated to produce. In this way, they won't pull the bottles that are in the process of having reagents added to them, but will pull the products.