Increasing Mid To Late Game Ore Efficiency

Currently, as you progress into the mid to late game, you are incentivized to use villager based iron farms if you intend to utilize iron in a large scale build. Personally, I'd rather not imprison villagers just to meet material demands, and I believe Mojang has expressed a similar sentiment.

The blast furnace could be reworked, or a new tier of furnace could be added, that requires materials to craft that would place it somewhere in the mid to late game for being acquired. The furnace would then yield additional ingots per ore smelted. You can just say this furnace is "more efficient at extracting ore" or something to the effect to have a semi-reasonable sounding explanation that fits into the game's logic. If you combine that with using a looting pickaxe, it should at least bump up iron production to a reasonable degree, and give players that would prefer not to use iron farms an alternative that feels more in-line with Minecraft's design philosphy. This also wouldn't interfere with iron farms as-is, so players who would prefer to use iron farms can continue to do so.

The only real issue I see with this idea is that it makes beacons easier to create, but so do existing iron farms, so I don't believe that's much of a reason not to at least look into something to allow the player to increase ore production in a way that feels more natural than manipulating villager mechanics. This would also apply to copper and gold.