I've had an idea for a while similar to this that you may be interested in, I agree that the smoker and blast furnace need more relevance. The smoker has a intermediate with the campfire for early game unlike the blast furnace so I see why you changed the recipe. My idea was to make the normal furnace only yield iron nuggets and blast furnaces yield iron ingots as you have done. In this proposal the recipe would be slightly cheaper replacing the top middle ingot with a clay block (real furnaces and blast furnaces traditionally use a clay sand mix for insulation as well as steel/iron), andchain mail could be crafted with iron nuggets.
This would increase the early game progression where to get to iron armor you would have to balance getting chainmail to be safer mining with saving up for a blast furnace unlocking ingots. It would balance iron ore dropping multiple raw ore and being affected by fortune. Finally it would chainmail a place in the progression and a proper recipe.

Anyway what do you think?