The redstone upgrades are nice, but the fact that they emit redstone on all sides can cause some issues. For example, I just ran into an issue where I was feeding items into a drawer with a hopper and I wanted to detect when the barrel was half full. The redstone signal worked, but it also turned off the hopper.

I realise this is an old issue, but is it a feature likely to be added ever? I'm playing 1.19.2 and want to use a hopper to pull from a drawer, but stop the system from running if a drawer is empty. a comparator reading the drawer would be the vanilla way, but the redstone upgrade locks the hopper below, making the drawer much less versatile for vanilla+ type packs without pipes as an alternative extraction method

Found another use case for this. Now that drawers keep their inventory when broken, I'm building a bulk storage system that places, fills and breaks drawers to keep in deep storage. Sort of like a cheaper bulk storage system.

The issue is that upgrades cannot be inserted automatically, which sort of defeats the point of this contraption. I can detect when the hopper backs up, but this is more complex and less obvious to most players.

Is the upgrade insertion thing a separate issue/request or is it related to comparators?

It's a separate issue. I was explaining a situation where comparator support would be useful.

I want to create a machine that crafts a brand new storage drawer and places in the world. Then the machine will fill up the drawer, break it and place a new one. It would work like a shulker box loader, storing huge amounts of items in a small space.

To create a system like this, I need to automatically detect when a storage drawer is completely full. Since a freshly crafted storage drawer can't contain any upgrades, comparator support would be convenient.

I was going to publish the same thing, it was very useful for a "purchase" system that I had planned to do (that detects 4 items and returns another) but I need to use a hopper for it to work, but with the redstone system it blocks it, and the comparator it doesn't detect anything so I just can't use it.

It makes sense for the hopper to crash since the entire block is energized, and I don't know if it's possible to disable only the bottom part, but I don't understand why the comparator doesn't work with this as it detects almost everything in the game.