While I have no expertise in material science, it is definitely not some minecraft crafting - depending on the procedure, you may get only few percents of usefu

While I have no expertise in material science, it is definitely not some minecraft crafting - depending on the procedure, you may get only few percents of useful output that you may have no way to further purify. At least for chemistry, it is often a completely different paper that introduces an efficient way for actually mass-producing the given chemical. The first one is more like a proof of concept throwaway code, if we want an analogy.