In certain modpacks, when interacting with other mods like AE:2, the compacting drawer creates problems when large amounts of metals are stored that also expose nuggets. When AE:2 calculates automatic crafts, having billions of nuggets in the system causes lag spikes. If we could add an upgrade that "disables" or "downgrades" the drawer to only expose two levels, that would be very useful in certain cases. Because of these lag spikes, I've had to abandon using compacting drawers to store metals in Enigmatica 2 Expert. I understand this is largely an issue with AE:2, but it could be mitigated by not exposing the nuggets.

Example use case would be to setup a compacting drawer that only shows iron ingots and iron blocks. No iron nuggets are shown, available, or provided to AE:2 via drawer controller / storage bus. Storage upgrades would provide the same amount of storage for iron blocks as if the nuggets were present. The only difference is no nuggets.

There's a couple weird issues that can happen with AE2 and compacting drawers and they've been discussed in depth in the past, but I haven't heard of millions/billions of an item exposed being a problem. Are you sure that's the issue at hand?