Might be a bit late to mention this, but instead of a cobble gen > furnace > smooth stone > brick setup you can go with a magma crucible > smoothstone gen > brick setup. A single bucket of lava can produce 50 smooth stone in the igneous extruder at the cost of MJ from burning netherrack/cobble or from just pumping a lava source and you wouldn't need to smelt the stone. In a way it would produce the stone faster, but be a bit more power intensive.
For numbers if burning cobble it would take 2.5x more power per smooth stone, burning netherrack the power usage is the same as smelting the cobble, and if just pumping lava it would be the cost of pumping the lava. The powered furnace takes 160 mj per smooth stone, for power references.
Since you're probably swimming in cobble now it's probably a non-issue, but it's something that's good to know for future reference at least.
Edit: Blah, but it looks like he nerfed Magma Crucibles with netherrack again, so it'll probably be more expensive for that as well.