At the moment when you use the processing station to break down blocks, you only get back half the materials, which means if you want the materials for building other blocks, you're better off placing them and manually destroying them to get full materials back.
Not really got into the very late game yet so I don't know how unbalanced it would be if the Processing Station were to give you full mats for broken down blocks.
It feels like a question of my time use as a player; what could I be doing instead of manually placing blocks to destroy them, or harvesting a whole island for fresh wood for example. Over just putting the blocks in the processing station and letting it do the menial stuff while I get on with making the sky-ship.