I am aware it has been a couple of weeks since this thread was last written to, but I wish to give my own perspective, after having read through the whole thing:
A lot of what I see on this thread is about people arguing for some sort of hard limit on "power level", that anything beyond that, no matter the cost or time investment, is inherently overpowered, or at least detrimental to the gameplay experience.
This is an opinion I not only do not share, I actively detest. Here is why:
One, I am in agreement that some mods are fundamentally incompatible either with each other or with certain pack types. As I said in another thread, mods designed for a vanilla playstyle, like Twilight Forest, have both their challenges completely trivialized and their rewards made obsolete as soon as they are plopped next to the high-power tech mods, RotaryCraft included.
Yet these hard limits ignore this fact, instead arguing "a mod should never be able to do X", or "if the mod can do X, it must always also do Y". What "X" and "Y" are differ not only from person to person - another nail in the coffin - but are fundamentally driven by these inter-mod interactions. Put a bunch of tech mods (and some, but fewer) magic mods next to each other, and noone blinks an eye at the idea of armor that makes a person nearly unkillable or a tool that speeds crop growth 50x. Add Twilight Forest, Infernal Mobs, Battle Towers, or Void Monster, and suddenly you have infinite loot. Is that the powerful mods' problem? No, it is because you mixed fundamentally incompatible mods.
The idea of configs to fix this is also rather naive. If you used a config to, for example, disable the ability to fly and heavily nerfed the damage reduction with a powersuit, you have just completely negated the whole point of using it in the first place, having dragged it down to near-vanilla levels with 500x the cost. Worse, seeing as their effects are global to a world, if you are on a server, you have just effectively punished everyone else who still wanted the armor yet had no intention of ever going near one of these mobs.
Two, the idea of a hard limit on what mods should and should not do is dangerous. As soon as it becomes generally accepted that "no mod should ever X", anything related to X is immediately out of consideration for creative development. This may not seem like a problem with simple numerical arms races like ore multiplication, but what about entirely new ideas that nonetheless are very powerful? Are you really going to say that some new feature must be summarily rejected based purely on its power level?
It also encourages developers of existing mods to start trying to bring their mods in line with this idea, and the end result is always negative. I am genuinely upset that we have seen several major mods nerf themselves to the point of uselessness over the last few versions by removing some of their best features or introducing such large caveats and/or costs that they become worthless. I will not name names, but I think everyone reading this can think of two immediately obvious examples.
Three, the whole argument is based on a false premise, that players will always go for the most "OP" option. Players go for what has (or they think has) the biggest reward/effort ratio. Look at RotaryCraft. Despite the fact the Extractor can multiply most ores 5x, nether ores 10x, and rare ores 13x, it comes in dead last for popularity among the general player population, purely because it is much harder to get working and until late-game with good design skills, takes longer to process a stack of iron than it does to manually mine five times that amount. Indeed, despite being one of the weakest options (only saved the title of weakest due to a rare bonus item), the TE pulverizer is far and away the most popular ore processor, purely because it is easy.
Point is, no matter how powerful something is, the idea that all the players will flock to it and ignore everything else, no matter the cost, is ludicrous. I could put a "win the game" button in RotaryCraft that gave you creative mode invulnerability and access to infinite resources, but if I made it cost millions of units resource, and made it require assembling a multiblock that makes the Tokamak look like a dirt hut, most people will not even attempt it, and the ones that do will have reached nearly that level already.
People forget this; the idea of a modpack is not to have mod A competing with mod B with mod C with mod D, it is about providing not only a choice of mods to use but also the ability to progress and expand upon your abilities by unlocking them. When I play a world, with all the major tech mods, I do not go straight to RC, despite my memetically-large tendency for powergaming. I start with an AE grindstone, progress to a pulverizer, then use a macerator, then a grinder, then ultimately an extractor. Same for mining; I start by hand, then use quarries, and only then use a borer.
Four, it is hypocritical from the start. It assumes that "historically", mods have worked together and designed around each other's balance points, and that problems of inter-mod balance problems are new to recent versions of modded Minecraft. This is simply wrong. Even blatant examples like EE2 aside, nearly every mechanic you take for granted today was at one point a radical new idea that offered as-yet unseen power. How would you like now it if someone two years ago had made the same arguments you do now against the macerator, seeing as it halves the cost of nearly everything in the game? Or a jetpack? Powered armor? Teleportation? Automining? Autofarming? Designer worlds? Nearly infinite item storage in a few blocks? If this argument had gained traction back in the old tekkit days, mods like AE would simply not exist. Furthermore, this is exactly the argument made by a large proportion of "vanilla purists" who see mods as inherently cheating. To them, new abilities not present in the vanilla game, no matter the cost, go against the standard set by the game - arguably the most official standard of all.
In effect, by making the argument that certain features should be forever off-limits because they fall on the wrong side of some arbitrary line that you struggle to even clearly define, you are making a fundamentally identical argument, that some of the best mods we have, or even this entire community, should have never existed in the first place.
