High carbon steel dust should be craftable, which you can smelt for the ingot. HCS should have diamond mining level making it early game poor man's diamond tools for collecting obsidian. You could change the recipe for the forge and HCS is used to craft the alloy forge, crimson steel and azure electrum can only be crafted in the forge.

This would make HCS more useful as currently the only means of obtaining it is the forge which is made of crimson steel and at that point HCS is useless, its only slightly better than iron. This new change would make this material more useful as a substitute for diamond tools but with the drawback of low durability. It would also enhance the progression as currently I mostly loot compressed iron or obsidian and go straight to the nether to get crimson steel.

Players would be able to start alloying early game instead of it being locked away behind the nether.

other suggestions:
give blaze gold tips the auto-smelt ability, currently blaze gold is terrible and its only use is fire aspect on blades.

Reduce compressed irons mining level, it spawns in every loot chest and it break the progression cycle (you can skip iron and diamond tools) maybe reduce its mining level to the same as emerald or remove it completely.