This is another super duper simple suggestion that's been floating around under various names since the beta, but it's time to repeat it since there ~might~ be someone occasionally looking at this place again.

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Complex recipes. They are by & large not worth bothering with except for collecting or to feed the farmers (or tricking new players into thinking they are worth it). The stamina revamp went over terribly, and for good reason because it made the early game way harder for new players than it needed to. Just because the community is super nice and willing to help out doesn't mean they should have to "hotfix" a bad game design decision, so we can all just politely set that argument aside and leave it to its grave.

I understand the desire to have cute recipes that use multiple ingredients, and I think that is also a worthwhile thing that COULD very easily add variety and fun to the cooking skill tree! However, right now every single complex recipe is mathematically inferior to just filling up the cooking slots with raw fish/meat. You just can't beat the 1:1 ratio both in terms of raw stamina gain and because the multiples of 20 are just too efficient for spreading that stamina out. 6 nut feasts is 480 stamina (crafted over an hour; 10min per feast) that can only be used on 6 wolves for 80 stam each. A generic pot full of 24 fish is also 480 stamina, but you get it in like 20 minutes (1min per cooked fish) instead and it can be spread around as much as you want in chunks of 20, which allows for way more flexibility in how you can spend it, and ends up both a) cooking way faster and b) allowing you to get waayyyy more than 480 stamina an hour even if you aren't watching the pot like a hawk to absolutely maximize your efficiency. Do it twice an hour and you've already lapped the nut feast enjoyer.

A way to actually fix this is to have complex recipes give you multiple items per craft, which would allow them to at least compete successfully with the stamina-per-slot factor vs raw fish. It's a shame to sit on ingredients that have no other uses, but feel very :/ about ever using them because it's just a waste of cooking slots that could be filled with fishies or chicken legs. I have so many nuts I'd love to be using in nut feasts, and I'd love to be cooking breads and other cute things! It's just not appealing with the way things work right now, the nuts are more valuable raw and everything else just kinda sits there not being used. There might be concerns about stamina balancing, but with the changes to the way the campaign works with the explore bar limit, that's kinda irrelevant now imo.

In any case, stamina becomes moot after a while since grinding was never really incentivized and now it's currently really not incentivized, but I think it's still an important aspect of the game design because existing systems should be... good and mathematically functional?

Nerfing stuff sucks, so buffing what lags behind makes more sense in this case. If the Flea Market QoL changes go through, it might even encourage more people to actually sell stuff on the Flea Market more often, which would be a nice change from the steady but limited supply we get from the Diehards that are willing to individually list things Every. Single. Time. right now.

Another way I've seen suggested to.... sort... of manage it? would be allowing items to stack in the cooking pot, at least to a certain point*, but that by itself is more limited and runs into the same issues that exist right now, just on a bigger scale, lol.