Oxygen Mask Station wastes resources

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Power Consumption: Especially when set up new or used frequently, the OMS may strain to pull in enough oxygen unless there's an oxygen source immediately adjacent, and will continue to eat power all the while. This cannot be avoided via a pressure sensor to disable the OMS directly via automation or turning it off via a Power Shutoff, or even manually via "Disable Building" or a power Switch, as all these methods lead to the dupes just happily strolling by without donning a mask rather than busying themselves with other errands while waiting for the OMS to go back live.

This could be automated with a door that locks when there is not enough oxygen, on top of what ever else you wanted to for automation to the OMS. Just make sure to have 2 separate doors one locking and one that prevents access outside so they can use it to come back in if the door gets lock due to lack of oxygen. As for the metal yea it seems to be a ticket price for entry.

I agree about the gripe about the entry fee nature of the mask station.  I've watched a dupe run past a mask station to go pick up a single nosh sprout on the ground, then run out of the area.  15 ore gone for one stupid menial task that I didn't even care about.  Normally, this wouldn't faze me, but when starting on a new asteroid where resources can be scarce at the start, suboptimal task ordering/grouping leads to burning ore for no good reason.

One could argue that the task queue needs to be better optimized to group tasks within regions cut off by mask stations, but really, the low hanging fruit would be to fix the design of the mask station.  If each mask instance has its own O2 capacity, and when it's gone, the item disappears, then the mask station simply needs to have a check in mechanism similar to the atmo suit, except that it can allow for n masks.