Lucidstuck I

In other words BCS is a crutch that we shouldn't rely on 100% otherwise when it does run out we'll be left without having mastered our other dream manipulation abilities suddenly having to rely on them.

Ideally we'd be in the opposite situation, so proficient in our dream manipulation that we start forgetting that we even have BCS due to lacking the need to use it.

Recycling old equipment we no longer use/need would be a good idea.

A wise investment would be some form of crafting station. Like a place for smelting glass (we've got lots of sand on LoHaM) or ores if we can get access to those. That way we can still make stuff without having to expend BCS and we could use crafting to expand the arsenal further.

On the subject of acquiring ores for crafting...
If I understand correctly if Derrick takes a bunch of rocks and a piece of gold for example he can combine the gold across multiple rocks and end up with many "rock with gold in it" items. We could then use that method to dupe ores for the hypothetical smeltery.

Now that I think about it, couldn't we do the same thing with BCS? We could substitute the gold for BCS and end up with many "rock with BCS in it" items.

Would this actually be effective or is there rules which would prevent this that I'm forgetting about?

Combining one item across others is theoretically possible infinitely. So far there's nothing we know of that would stop that, aside from item combination tiers. Even then there's a loophole to put one item across infinite others.

The BCS however is resistant to crafting, so that's not possible as far as I'm aware. However, we can do mundane things to BCS to make it work more efficiently.