Besides proliferation being able to duplicate metals, there were other attempts at using Reductive Metallurgy glyphs to solve the puzzle with a good metric score.

This machine demonstrates one of the ideas I was playing around with - you can change the rotation of the Ravari Wheel inputs to try different sets of combinations.

The idea is to use deposition to first divide a metal into an upper and a lower half. If you use two purifications to compare it to the upper and lower halves of another metal, then the two metals will match precisely if both purifications succeed! This allows gold to be processed the same as other metals.

Well, except now you need to special case the LEAD atoms a little bit. Thankfully, lead can be moved directly to the output of the purification and everything gets handled correctly with little fuss.