I feel you so much. We have “surplus chests” entirely filled with a single resource, and labeled accordingly. After the sixth or seventh light leather chest, we decided to start throwing it away, and we’ll probably do the same with branches when the time comes.
The problem with arrows is that I am at the “dragonbone arrows only” stage, which only use dragonbone and feathers, not a single stick. For most special effect arrows, a single ironhead arrow does the trick, and those usually drop from NPC, so I hardly craft them anymore.
Using them as fuel would be ok, but considering you still get an excess of dry wood from the dryers (which we ended up using instead of oil or even coal). The fact that you can turn wood into branches as a “reward” for finding a T5 carpenter feels like a prank. WHY in the world would I need more branches, and why would I want to sacrifice wood in order to get them.
Meanwhile, the recipe for getting bark from wood is incompatible with mass production. Taking into account that you need 2 bark to dry 1 wood, you’d need 10k of wood to dry an additional 1k (IF you have a T3 carpenter or better, of course), so it’s clearly there to get a little (very little) extra bark using your extra wood, and not as the main source for bark.
So, I want to propose this: Recipe: branches to bark.
Since a piece of wood yields 2 branches, 5 pieces of wood (the bare minimum to craft 1 bark) would produce 10 branches. An original cost of 20 branches per unit of bark would ensure that, even with a high level carpenter, the cost doesn’t go below 10 branches, preventing you from turning wood into branches and then into bark to miraculously produce extra bark somehow. With 10 branches (after modifiers) per unit of bark, a full stack of branches would yield a meager 100 bark, which isn’t imbalanced at all, and it would be a good way of helping you get rid of your excess branches without making thousands of bug kabobs to power your wheels of pain out of sheer boredom.