Inputs and outputs are tedious? What? That's a very important part of AE.
E.g., put an export bus on the top of a macerator, and an import bus on the side. The export bus will automatically export every iron ore you get and put the iron dust into AE. You put another export bus on a powered furnace, induction furnace, etc., and put an import bus on the side. Then you can set it up so that you automatically get the dusts smelted into ingots.
Export bus and import bus are much better than BC pipes because things don't spill out of them. E.g., I have an alveary for oil bee production. It tries to put both oily combs and propolis into a centrifuge. It was set up with pipes before. It worked fine at normal speeds, because it would process the comb and the proplis would come much later. But when I upgraded the alvearies with frames, it became too fast. There would still be propolis in the squeezer when the next oily comb would be ready. Since there was no place for it to go, it spilled to the ground.
I changed it to AE. The oily combs and the propolis both go to AE. The centrifuge has an export bus on it that automatically pulls oily combs and proplis from AE and puts it in the centrifuge. Here's the thing. If the centrifuge can't accept it, it won't import it So if there is propolis in the centrifuge and another proplis goes into AE, it sticks the proplis into the centrifuge. But if an oily comb comes into the system, it waits until the centrifuge is empty before it puts the oily comb in there.
Same thing with scrap and matter fabricators. My base is solar. So during the day, it has a lot of power, but during night, it doesn't. On my old base, where I had recyclers connected via BC pipe to the matter fab. I was constantly having problems with this fact. If I didn't make scrap quick enough, it would be fine at night, but burn through all the scrap during the day. If I made scrap quick enough to handle the day, it would spill all over the floor at night. AE doesn't have that problem. Scrap gets imported into AE and exported to the matter fab. Excess is automatically stored in AE.