I'm sure I'm not the first to request improvements to the storage system but I believe with the changes in 9.0 to the crafting system it has gone from annoying to unmanageable.
1. A search system for contracts/laws to allow the user to search for a item/storage by its name. When setting up contracts to harvest my farms I have to scroll through a list of what feels like hundreds of items to find the correct storage to designate, even with named chests and knowing they are listed in order of being placed makes this a gruesome task. On a side note we should also be able to designate more than 1 storage to place items in my huckleberry farm fills 3 chests every harvest and there is no good way to setup that allows the player to put the items in the required chest.
2. An Increase to stockpile and chest link distance. This is more of a problem for stockpiles now then it is chests as it is easy to be able to link 20+ chest to a workstation while it can be extremely challenging to link more than 3 or 4 stockpiles/ 1 or 2 lumber stockpiles. There are really 2 methods of selling/buying stockpile items like hewn logs. 1 setup a store that takes in logs, auto process with a huge que into hewn logs and sells hewn logs (this has many problems touched on later). Or simply stack as many stockpiles full of hewn logs next to a shack with a store.
3. We need something to improve control of item storage during production below are 3 solutions which could help.
a. Add a Craft Until option for work benches. We can already create a stop point for buying input but we cant create a stop point for manufacturing. The result of this is prior to unified currency auto process facilities either grown in output(profit) until overflowing or make no profit. After unified currency players can abuse stores with auto ques by never buying the output and only ever selling the input causing the output to overflow into the input storage. Though this is resolved by players buying the output it generally leads store owners to restrict output by limiting items ques and storage available in an effort to prevent being stuck with useless items. This generally slows down the gameplay even more.
b. Separate workstation input and output storage selections. Actually helps 2 as well since you can create a production line type situation where it pulls from 1 side and outputs the other without ever overflowing back into the input side.
c. Allow players to designate specific locations in there storage system to store specific items. Allows the splitting of outputs from a workbench enabling dedicated storage for items. A good example where this could be extremely useful is Ore processing. Now you can easily separate Tailings from Ore and create a contract for someone to move the Tailings without them moving the ore/ingots.
If you have made this far thanks for reading my ramblings on storage!