Reproduction with:

• Ironpipe
• Iron fluid pipe

Problem

• Ironpipes wont connect automatically:
  
• A lot of buggy fiddle with the wrench is required as the connection is also not set up properly when using the wrench:
  

Updated title and description. Also added a screenshot. after further testing I found out that this only applies to Iron pipes.

Intended. Iron pipes are used to control the direction of items, so you have to wrench them in the direction you want the items to go.

ah okay. thx

...wait this new behaviour isn't a bug? I find it annoying if I've only got a single chest to connect a pipe to, and there's a "TODO" bit in code

Wrenching pipes to connect to chests I believe is intended to easily decide what inventory they connect to. The engine issue is a duplicate of #3336

...This one was left for a long time, but it's finally fixed in dev for 7.99.17.