I know this is a long shot, since it's more of a niche "nice to have" feature and certainly not a must, BUT...I was ruminating on how nice it would be to be able to slap a height range into a crophopper and it would only pick up crops grown within that range in the chunk. The benefits of this are possibly twofold: You could have a manual farm in the same chunk as an auto farm I'd assume being able to reduce the range the croppers are monitoring for updates might reduce their lagginess (?)
It kind of defeats the point of the crophopper because once you build your cropper farm big enough to hit the limits, you could fill the rest of your island height with piston farms on melons and pumpkins, which is what crophoppers were supposed to replace (not compliment). This may seem true at first but it is not the case.
Yea I wasn't sure. It would either reduce overhead by reducing search area for updates OR increase overhead by making each cropper now have to first find out "what's my search area?" on every update. If it's the latter case...then I actually don't even support my own suggestion.