Agreed - I've always wished recipes would have two ingredients lists: one for shopping and one for prep. Like some recipes will call for half a cup of diced onions... So do I buy one onion or two? And recipes that spread ingredient prep throughout the steps make it a pain if you want to prep up front. Having a semantic list of ingredients means you could display them in whichever format is more helpful in the moment.
My other gripe is when recipes tell you to prep 4 tbsp of an ingredient but aren't clear that you only use 3 in an early step and are supposed to save the other 1 tbsp for an end step. Not sure how this could be programmatically solved though