Quick suggestion to both speed up steel creation and to add in a new potential decoration block.
Block of Crude Iron - 3x3 Crude Iron craft, use for condensing. Also can be crafted with a Block of Coal (or Block of Charcoal if the player is using a mod with that item type) and a Block of Iron.
You can blast a Block of Crude Iron into a Block of Steel, with 9x the XP reward as the regular blasting recipe for a single crude iron.
I've been using simply steel as a steel ingot standin while using the better furnaces reforged mod, and that mod has a platinum tier furnace upgrade after diamond furnaces. There aren't any "simply platinum" styled mods out there for 1.20.1 that also make sense to be post-diamond tier (there's one that has this name, but it's a gold variant and is last updated for 1.19.2).
My suggestion here, to match that better furnace reforge parity, is to create a new tier using similar logic as steel, only instead of processing iron with coal, it's nether quartz with some other item.