Well this was a doozy of a metric, it's kind of fun when you have metrics that require a very specific tech to get min primary, I don't know if it has a name so i'll call it bond transfer, funny how i used this for both metrics and both my solves have a similar concept behind the optimization. 
Quite happy with how this turned out and i am very confident this will place good, it was fun to get down from 450 area to 46, there is a lot of area reuse for example arms 1,2 and 8 basically come for free since they only move over glyphs and arm 3 shares the area of the track with arm 8, also using piston arms and linear tracks as a pseudo halt was the revelation that brought the area down so much, also using conditional purification of the iron to copper allowed me to shave a bit more area since arm 10 fully extends and would collide with arm 13.
But yeah i cannot se how you could squeez even more area out of this solve.