This came about because of the sheer number of motors / copper wires needed in nuclear fluid engineering. Why not have a "Block Extruder" for wires the way there is a "Block Cutter" for plates? it could use an extruding die that could run out over time, and would turn one block of metal into 27 wires (or 36 for gold / iron) at once. It would only work with tin, copper, gold and iron.
Block Extruder like Block Cutter
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The block cutter is already a nearly useless machine. I don't think this would have a much more use than the block cutter.
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The block cutter is basically a glorified sawmill at the moment.
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Overclocking combined with just making more machines makes the process much faster. To make doing it manually better is strange and backwards logic compared to the rest of the mod.
The hammer should really take 2 ingots per plate, and the only reason it likely doesn't is it'd make early game too expensive.
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I still think a method for making wire faster would be a good thing. There are dedicated extruders in real life; why not in Minecraft?
Because you end up with a machine that does one thing and kind of feels redundant. The block cutting machine is very much far from a key machine, and if people want fast plates they don't even use it, they just make hammers. An extruder would fair little better.
Alternately, how many overclockers does it take to make a machine work 9x faster, and how many transformer upgrades would it take to power the machine at that level?
6 would make it work ~9x faster, and that'd take ~168 EU/t for the metal former, which considering it's tier 1, would mean you'd need 2. Not ideal as it ends up being just under 2x more expensive per plate/wire/whatever but it's going to do it a hell of a lot faster. You could even work around it with some energy storage upgrades, you could probably get away with it being tier 1 (ie no transformer upgrades) if you supplied it with multiple packets of energy per tick.
Alternately, do you have a bank of metal formers in your workshop in minecraft, and if so, do you find that level of repetition enjoyable?
A bank of machines is not a workshop at all but a factory, which I find a fun project to build. IC2 as a mod works well in factory type situations as slightly overclocking lots of machines is the best way to go about speeding up production without having insane energy costs.
Repetition is crafting it all by hand which is absolutely no fun at all, not least because of all the times you'd have to empty your inventory out. Advanced Machines did have an upgraded form of each mode of the metal former (like the induction furnace is to the electric furnace), and I'd say if you wanted any kind of upgraded form you'd want something like that rather than another slow, low tier machine.
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A machine, that only does things, that other machines also do, but nothing more is a bad machine imo, since it can only do that specific thing. And it doesn't even do it much better than the metal former, since you can overclock that one. As I said, it would be similar to the Block Cutting machine, that is barely used atm and a pretty much useless machine.