There are 2 storage tanks, so we have 8 tiles to work with (maybe a little more if pipes end up being shorter but that doesn’t matter). Off the top of my head, I could do it in 5 tiles. First, a decider combinator as a basic memory cell to count the crafts, resetting at 2x. Then another to pick the recipe earlier in the ui if the count is less than x. Finally, a constant combinator with the later recipe as the fallback option when the other turns off. Switching for a second decider would make the system more robust against any changes with priority when there are multiple recipe signals, but that is still 6 tiles, which is an improvement.
Great improvement! I wonder if it is viable for early game speedruns?