I noticed 1 more thing - with realistic alpha worldgen Red Sand is a lot more common than before. 1 red sand = 0.5 iron + 0.01 * 1/9 diamond dust + 0.5 sand. This means that if you find desert with red sand you have almost unlimited supply of iron once you reach LV tech.
Yes, you could also find it in normal worldgen, but you have to search quite a lot for a rare mesa biome.
I don't think that having unlimited things is always bad (otherwise we would not have bees), but it costs only 1500 EU to process it in centrifuge and it takes 2 seconds. And you can mine sand A LOT faster than iron ore.