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.

High carbon steel is only intended to serve as an example for creating custom ingots. It's not meant to be useful in any way.

There is definitely a valid point to making compound material crafting available earlier in the game however. I'm just not sure how I would want to implement it.

-make the alloy forge cheaper, requiring iron ingots or crimson iron or HCS instead of crimson steel blocks
-complex alloys such as crimson steel and azur electrum can only be made in the alloy forge and can then only be alloyed in the compounder?(block that lets you mix metals with gems/fabrics etc.)
-make tyrian steel a two step process, move tyrian steel to the compounder it will produce inert tyrian which has to be 'awakened' using starlight infusion, this would make more sense and adds another layer of progression

I second this as alltheores is the only real workaround atm for this. As you make dusts of basic metals and then make the target alloy dust at a crafting table and smelt said dust in a furnace, or we define all those alloys' recipes with the ingots, raw ores, and dusts interchangeably for the alloy smelter s gear has. I'm trying to make data packs to do this, but I don't even know where to start as of this time.