My first attempt was probably worse than yours, but after I was mostly done with all the levels, I went back and applied what I had learned to all the earlier levels. I was able to reduce giant, sprawling messes of mostly conveyors to much more compact machines. Of course, the more important part is finding the optimal algorithm.
Up until the last column or two, there's neat solutions to all of them, but some of the later ones really do require a huge part of the level and a nearly unreadable tangle of paths.
