How do you decide what recipes to use?

I'm at tier 4 currently. I have a coal power plant making 1500MW or so, and I have a temporary steel factory. I was making a factory for all the basic resources for manual use like reinforced iron plates, rotors, AI limiters, and the space elevator parts.

I'm probably overthinking it, and I don't even have all the recipes unlocked, but how do I know, for example, when to use iron wire instead of out of copper. I'm currently using the fused wire recipe cuz I have copper and caterium right next to each other. But even if I didn't have any close by, I could probably just run a conveyer belt and bring it, I don't know if I'd ever use the iron wire. Same for the iron pipes, if I didn't have coal close by here, I would've probably just brought it over cuz it'll use less iron. I only have 1 pure coal node right next to me, so I'll probably find out soon what it'll be like running out of coal.

So how do I decide?