I greatly appreciate this analysis Brian. Thank you.
This is one part of my attempts to understand how to document/control Manufacture of anything using ERPNext, but in particular a dead trivial example for demonstration purposes described here if you haven’t seen it:
Hopefully with yours, @JayRam 's and other’s help I can document my experience to help others in the future.
I need to check out the solutions @JayRam suggests before I dig in deeper as you suggest. Give me a few days, ok?