You are absolutely right
Fusion has been in SS13 for so many years and has seen so many iteration when people tried to improve the process but for some reason no one gave it any real purpose
Ability to create high temperatures doesn’t add anything new or useful to the game.
For most cases you can control temps just with easily available freezers/coolers and gas reactions that require anything above it are usually achievable with almost any plasma fire. That heat and pressure isn’t required for power production either since power management (nor gas management ever since we got gas miners) isn’t really a thing and you can produce enough to cover any needs with just solars, not to mention SM
Things I mentioned can’t be easily fixed, it would require redoing from scratch core elements of the game and its balance but maybe we could find some use for particles coming out of fusion
Some time ago I had 2 potential uses for them
First got inspired by real life neutron doping in nuclear reactors, materials are bombarded with neutrons to change their properties.
We could make it so material sheets either laying around or placed into some target device would change into different material when exposed to certain amount of particles at certain power levels. Then those materials could be used in construction, for example for building a mech you could use regular materials let’s say plasteel or instead, at same stage use its doped version to get mech with slightly different parameters (different resistance to certain damage, speed etc) or maybe it could be just added afterwards like goliath plates. Some late technology items could be locked behind requirement of doped materials as well since almost everything gets researched during every single longer round, this would differentiate them a bit and require cooperation between departments
Second, smaller and easier to implement would be getting rid of particle accelerator and making Tesla/Singularity trigger by particles from fusion. That would limit ability to destroy station by griefers (just a reminder, we didn’t manage to stop that griefer from few weeks back, they just got bored and gave up on their own). It would also make them a bigger feat and by that bigger achievement, especially if one could control particle energy at certain levels not to make singulo/tesla too powerful, and let’s be honest, engineers and atmosians are all about doing things just for virtual respect
Those are just a two very vague ideas, others probably can bring something better to the table but I guess we need to start conversation somewhere and most importantly we need to make it known to maintainers and every person around who can code that purpose for fusion is needed and wanted