It's not meant to be cheap
I think the pipe flows are relatively balanced as they are now but my only qualm is that for really high end designs the upper limit per pipe is somewhat... limiting.
Maxing the output hatches on an LHE (5 I believe) and using all huge tungstensteel pipes (48 B/s) results in a max throughput of 240 B/s (wowzers). A 2 B/s lava LHE as it behaves now (which may be wrong) outputs 160 B/s of SHS. It's still possible to get all of the steam out but it requires 5 of the highest tier pipes. This isn't really an issue and requires high builds to have high end costs (and induce pipe routing nightmares).
Did you confirm that? Tungstensteel pipes have 48 B/s capacity, but, as Spwnx said, they empty only half of their capacity to next container, what means that they actually transport 24B/S.
If that's really true, you would need 10 of those pipes. That's why I think they are way too expensives...