I found a pretty easy way to get water. Once you have enough cobble to make a barrel (easy to get if you use a cobblegen node setup), just compost leaves, use the dirt to make the dirty water, then cook it for regular water. 8 leaves versus having to wait on 50 to melt down in the crucible.
That is intended. You are supposed to get to the point of automating water, usually with a harvester/planter combo. Of course, that takes tech, and that take Pneumaticcraft. It is a deliberate balance point.
With the removal of rain, I will be re-adding wooden barrels and reverting stone barrels to their normal crafting recipe. I will also, then, buff leaves to 100 mB each and nerf saplings slightly to 100 mB each. The idea being the transposer/crucible route is faster but less efficient, while composting->dirt->dirty water->clean water is more efficient but slower and harder to automate.
If I can get a way to add transposer recipes directly, I'd like to remove leaves from the crucible and add them to the transposer. ATM I can't do that, as the method I am using now requires that a)all recipes have an output and b) all recipes be reversible. Making recipes that can not thus be exploitable is somewhat hard, I need the output items something you can get normally or cannot be used elsewhere. (A good example of this failing is oak tree sapling->grass. Grass can be composted, meaning you can double dip the water output a bit)
Edit: Someone mentioned a problem automating pressure regulation in Pneumaticcraft. The simplest way to do this is using a pressure gauge tube and 8 redstone. Simply replace one of the regular pressure tubes in your system with a pressure gauge system, lay down 8 redstone between it and your compressor, and set the compressor to turn off when it receives a redstone signal. Since the gauge gives off a signal equal to twice the pressure it contains, when your system goes above 4 bars of pressure that puts off enough redstone signal to travel through 8 redstone dust and turn off the compressor. When the pressure drops below 4 bars, the compressor will lose the signal and turn back on. Do note, the compressor will not turn off until it completes a burn cycle, it won't just stop in the middle. For coal and charcoal this isn't a problem, as even 1 extra won't be enough to push the pressure into the red zone. Using coal or charcoal blocks, otoh, is dangerous as a full block is more than enough to raise the pressure too much.