Current situation:
Chests must be placed in world and configured with dyes + a diamond

Desired situation:
Chests can be configured via crafting with dyes and/or a diamond

Why
Tedious to place and configure 10+ enderchests

Examples

would yield

For the diamond lock, either:

• a custom recipe handler could be used to grab the crafter's identity
  or
• a separate item could be added that the player could bind to them self. That would then be used in the recipe.

Example of the latter from another mod:

This would also be nice for tanks as well.

Chests/Tanks can be configured with dyes in the crafting grid currently. But not locked, Having the Recipe just grab the player's identity, won't work in all situations such as Auto crafting.
I've considered a 'Bound Item' of some kind the player can hand to friends or use in AutoCrafting, which lets anyone configure an EnderChest/Tank, locked to the owner of the 'Bound Item', be that in crafting or in world.
@Ecu, Thoughts on some form of 'Bound Item'?

Perhaps instead of being bound when crafted, a diamond in the recipe would have a locked-but-unbound chest as the result that would bind to whoever places it next? It doesn't provide a solution to full automation (excluding mechanical users maybe having some weird side effect) but it allows for the creation of many locked chests without having to manually lock them in world.

Good to know that the colour crafting already exists, perhaps a JEI note tab could mention it? Or maybe a JEI recipe that shows it cycling the dyes similar to how it does with oredict-substitutable items. Forgive me if this has already been done, I don't have my game open to check and I'm playing on a 1.12 pack so I don't expect new features to have been backported. I could create a new issue to track that separately if that's appropriate.

It already does cycle through I though.. Some modpacks break the recipes by heavy hand removing all recipes for EnderChest/Tanks.

Chests/Tanks can be configured with dyes in the crafting grid currently. But not locked, Having the Recipe just grab the player's identity, won't work in all situations such as Auto crafting.
I've considered a 'Bound Item' of some kind the player can hand to friends or use in AutoCrafting, which lets anyone configure an EnderChest/Tank, locked to the owner of the 'Bound Item', be that in crafting or in world.
@Ecu, Thoughts on some form of 'Bound Item'?

Could be good. Though, I'm not sure if it would really solve the issue. You would still need to manually create the binding item and fill a chest full of them or something for auto-crafting. Suppose that might be an acceptable solution though.

If you do implement it, I would have it replace the diamond cost in general. Maybe make it a coin that has the face of the player that created it on it. Then attach that to the latch, rather than just making it blue. My two cents anyways. I say implement it how you see fit.

I was more thinking the Binding item is multiple-use. You bind it to a player, then craft a 'locked' ender chest with it / smack one, to re-bind it. Meaning we could do the 'craft locked but not bound until placed' stuff as well. Ideally, I'd like to keep the custom material like items to a minimum and I think the diamond is a good fit as is. I'll consider implementing this for 1.16.