A new way to do research?

[Ion]

This is my first post here and I wanted to both check if this has been done before or if it's feasible.

I find research in rimworld very boring and non-sensical on a realism level. For instance, it takes the same amount of time (not regarding other factors such as intelligence level and cleanliness of the room) to research sowing trees as it does to research shields. I feel like one should take way more time to do than the other. So I thought of a system that would make research a much more active system than having a pawn sit in a room; artifacts and testing.

The way it would work is that in order to research something you need that thing in order to research it. For instance, precision rifling. Let's say you already have all the research prerequisites for it, then studying at a hi-tech research bench would only go so far before you need a pawn to tear into an AR. For me, this would make weapons that you can't use, like biocoded weapons, more useful. You could raid bases not only for their resources but also for their stuff. If you're a tribe and are looking to manufacture guns, you could raid an industrial base and bring their guns and machining tables back to base to break them down in order to research machining.

The second part of it would work in a way where breaking it down wouldn't make sense, like psychite refining or brewing. Once you have your drug lab set up, your research pawn(s) could research something like psychite refining by simple trial and error. The pawn would research a bit on the process at the research bench, then use a drug lab to make test samples. Depending on how it would work you could then feed those samples to prisoners or colonists to see their effects, the pawn will observe and the research progresses until yayo or flake is finally made, fed to someone, and they get the desired effect.

Lastly, not all research artifacts would be from things like guns or production tables. Books could be used to fill in large parts of the blanks. Your pawns raid a base and find a small library containing recipes to make shield belts. Your research pawns take those books and study them at the research bench and then learn everything they need to make shield belts. It'd kind of mirror the vanilla way of research but it's more active as you'd have to actively go looking out for them as opposed to just waiting for raiders to drop some artifacts. I know blueprints do something similar, but that is instantaneous, while this would be over time similar to vanilla.

So to explain in whole, let's take machining as an example. Your colony has recently discovered the wonders of electricity, and they want to know how to make those boomsticks that the raiders keep using. They go to the raider's base and find loads of guns, a machining table, some downed raiders, and books on how to make guns and other stuff. You haul all of that back to base and get your wisest researcher to look at them. They at first read the books which allow them to properly dismantle the guns and bullets to see how they work. After some deconstruction and reassembly, the wise researcher makes a rudimentary gun ready for testing. Those prisoners that were caught are now tied to a pole as your archer does his best to fire the gun at centre mass. Some tests go really well, others make certain colonists lose their arms. With enough artifacts, books, and testing, your colony finally knows how to make shiny boomsticks to fight back those raiders.

So has anyone done something similar to this? If not, how feasible would it be as a first mod to do? Modding is something I want to get into, especially for rimworld.