Have one worker on refining. Give them a tier at or one above the one you are currently getting into.
Set one worker to refine ore to dust.
Have as many workers as possible clicking the grids on the lowest tiers of the mine.
Upscaling dust
Dust can be scaled up to the next level with 8 dust plus one of the next level. This makes lumps, which are refined in the mixer to make 2 of the target dust. Effectively, you can at most double your dust if you have 8x of the lower tier. An exotic gem upgrade for 60 reduces the lower tier cost.
Steps
I'm slowly figuring things out about the steps section.
Crafter allows scanning (sacrificing?) items to learn them. This starts with ore not dust.