Inara works fine for me - it does include those 'dead' materials, but it also tells you that they are used in zero engineering recipes.
If you are desperate to avoid using Inara, engineer locations are available in game, and there's an overlay called EDEngineer that you can use to check material requirements. You can also make shopping lists of materials - say if you were planning ten rolls on an FSD and ten on a thruster, you tell it what level roll, how many rolls, and it gives you a list!
one thing I would like to see on Inara as a definitive penalty list for weapon special ability side effects, as the descriptions sometimes, but not always, mention a drawback, and they never quantify the drawback - would be cool to look up the corrosive spectrum breaker Jedi mind trick special ability and find out if my penalty will be nothing, or 5%rof, or 99% damage.