In SSP, I'm not interested in wasting two hours of my life running around like an idiot looking for meteors. That isn't even semi-interesting, it's just stupid crafting components. The only difference between having 4 settings built into the machine and 4 patterns you have to collect in randomized chests is time. So I don't consider this a real balancing effort, just a bad attempt at a band-aid. Not that many people I know thought AE1 was unbalanced in that area. This is not taking SMP into account, and that's a whole other story.
On a brighter note, the Part 3 of the spotlight showcases the P2P tunnels, the spacial storage (which sadly is going to be pretty useless unless most modders jump on board) and this nifty part that allows for dedicated subnetworks. The last one in particular allows you to run stuff such as P2P tunnels easily.