One of the more frustrating aspects I find with regards to base building is the limited amount of things you can build based on how many of an item is in inventory. This is particularly noticable when building a new base somewhere.
My suggestion is that link in subnautica 1, players can merge multiple base materials together, like the tritanium ingot. Basically the player would merge 12 tritanium/quartz/glass etc into a single ingot that uses battery like functionality. When using the habitat builder it uses these ingots to count as 10 effective tritanium when building.
Once the ingot is drained, the item is deleted from inventory. On deconstruction, the normal receipe is used and uses the normal inventory space. IE you can construct with the ingot, but get individual tritanium peices when deconstructing. The loss based formula is intentional. This is to make sure that the player is conciously dedicating those resources to base building.
This could also work as a means to transport raw materials, player create the ingots at the loss based formula 12, but can use the fabricator to revert a full ingot back into 10 if the individual items.
The idea is basically trading total resources for convenience. Also these ingots are only used by the habitat builder, to prevent users from using them to hoard materials. Additionaly given that the habitat builder is now used to create beacons and other simple deployables the ingots would make creating things like that while away from home more convenient.