I haven't played around with barrels but hey I'll give you some tips breh.
First off, ditch that barrels thing. Look into Drawers.
Look into Logistics Pipes. They're great to use. I'll post some pictures in just a minute, I'll show you my setup.
But essentially you're going to want to get heavily into Logistics Pipes and Drawers. Logistics Pipes allow easy to program access for any and all inventory storage devices. It'll take awhile to figure out everything but like, endgame that's what you want to sort all your stuff.
Build big rooms. I've got three rooms for use with my pipes and stuff. One for the drawers and my logistics crafting tables, one for my machines, and one for my fluid tanks. Everything is interconnected with the pipes.
Using the logistics pipes I have a tremendous inventory that since I've chunkloaded the entire base I have access to a remote inventory combined with two ender pouches, one for inputting junk and one for what I order through one of the stuffs I have in my inventory.
And on top of all that, because of logistics pipes and how my stuff is setup, I have automated crafting. I ask for a specific item like a Tesseract or a Draconic Core and it auto-crafts it for me. It runs the necessary stuff through the necessary machines and makes items the way I'd do and instead of taking half an hour to craft something complex and needing to run around the base, I can queue it up in my remote inventory access from 2000m away, it'll craft it while I'm mining and then plop it into my ender chest that I can access through my ender pouch.