LMAO I found outdated info on that wikipedia page, in the best way.

"Some patterns require a very large number (sometimes hundreds) of glider collisions"

Ha -- when was that written?... Let's see, the original form of the statement showed up in 2012: "Some patterns require a very large number (scores, even hundreds) of glider collisions..."

At that time Andrew Wade had already created the self-constructing Gemini spaceship, which needed 173449 gliders to build ( https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Glider_synthesis#Spaceship_synth... ). The recipe could have been reworked to be a little cheaper, but nobody bothered at the time -- and now it can be done in fifteen gliders instead.

If you want to see the construction happening, I'd definitely recommend the old Gemini recipe over an RCT-based one, though! RCT cuts down the cost in gliders to a minimum, but at a terrible cost in the time you have to wait around to see the completed object.

True. I was thinking about spaceships and other oscillating movers.

It's not impossible that we could come up with a way of crashing less than 15 moving objects together to get an alternate RCT pattern.

Gliders are generally considered to be the "lowest common denominator", though, so adding complexity by allowing more types of spaceships isn't usually seen as an improvement.

... It also becomes possible to cheat: I suspect we could put together something like an "RCT8" if we allowed Corderships as well as gliders in the list of allowed moving objects that we start with. (2-engine Corderships' "engines" are switch engines, and we have to build four switch engines to get the RCT reaction started. Could probably just shoot down the extra switch engine with one glider, and go from there.)

To be honest, GoL isn’t quite as interesting as continuous-valued CAs — the latter break into quantum field territory.