"If there’s a decision with one option, it’s a waste of time to make the player make it."

That's a quote from an old dev blog, and it's absolutely true.

Given that, and given that many resource inputs only generate one output, is there a value to the current workshop mechanics? What I mean is, if berries only turns into jam, and raw steak only turns into cooked steak, and furthermore all food has roughly equivalent value, why have a screen where you tell your kitchen what to make? Why not simply have the kitchen job be to take the nearest available raw food and turn it into cooked food?

There's a whole level of micromanagement that could be removed with, as far as I can tell, zero impact on gameplay. Just assign people to the kitchen and they'll turn raw food into cooked food. This is how DF does it (with some additional options) and it's a big improvement.

 

because it's early access, nothing is balanced yet, a lot of things are placeholder for something which will be much more varied at some point?

the principle is to make sure that the code works as a whole even if the various items are clones at the beginning. you must be sure of the code robustness before you start to introduce the "functionnal" part which is setting up different objects to different parameters to make a meaningful gameplay. choices will happen at some point for the food, this is not the case now, but the framework still needs to be tested.

 

It's also worth noting that the food systems are currently in flux, and definitely not in their final form; food used to have a numeric 'food value', which represented how nourishing it was, and combination foods (e.g. lingonberries + wheat, yielding lingonberry pie) had higher food values than their constituent parts, which lent itself to interesting balancing when picking cooking priorities. That system was pared down to its current state, as I understand it, for reasons relating to colonist AI. I still have faith that food production's final form will still present interesting , non-trivial choices.

I can understand your concern when talking about, say, the carpentry workshop, which only turns logs into planks. If that was all it did, it might be better to let Work Crews do it without input from players (the way Mines and Chapels do it), but I assume the Carpentry workshop will eventually give us other outputs for logs.