The solve was first called "zaggy" because the obvious way to build a looping solution is to build a zig-zagging waste chain. Of course that turned out to be totally unnecessary, so the final solution is very much not zaggy.

First solve was pretty bad so I remade it from scratch. The resulting solve had an extra piston behind the output glyph, which just stored all the waste. I was ok with it, and moved on to cycles. Once I came back to this metric, I deleted the waste handling piston, and was surprised to see that there didn't seem to be anything that made the resulting layout impossible. After programming it, I got the solution you see here.

Width as a metric is pretty fun. Pistons seem pretty much required, which is a nice change for a cost puzzle. Excited to see if/how the top solves get around using pistons though.

This solve finally made me try out omclone and boy was that worth it. Typing instructions and immediately seeing them reflected in the current state instead of having to fast forward for 10 seconds is a huge time saver