@Omicron:
I'm curious about your 3) about the BC fuel, which changes?
It still seems quite rare.
There were quite a few tweaks in oil well generation over time. I remember when I played on a long-term map back in 1.2.5, I had this notion of a fossil fuel powerplant. I built a really nice refinery area, with tanks and pipes all over the place, and next to it a set of combustion engines. Since back then, MJ pretty much had no real use beyond driving refineries and quarries, pretty much all of it got converted into IC2 power, which fed my actual processing factory. It's relevant here because I remember having to jump through massive hoops getting enough oil. I played with 4 other people on the map, and between all five of us, we found three oil wells. All of them small sized. I claimed them all, and that was just barely enough for what I wanted to do, but if any of the others had wanted any it would have been difficult. We explored almost 100 MB worth of map area, too, and found maybe a grand total of one thousand buckets of the stuff in the entire time the map existed. Nowadays, if you're exploring that much, you're pretty much guaranteed a far larger amount of oil. People routinely fill tanks that contain more than one thousand buckets of oil, as if it was nothing special. And it really isn't, not anymore at least.
The probability for really large oil wells went up significantly after the generation system was changed to incorporate the bedrock "oil spring" blocks creating renewable oil underneath large wells. Because you automatically get a large well when one of those spawns, you have a far higher number of large wells nowadays than you used to. The formula was also tweaked to generate more mid-sized ones instead of small ones, and mid-sized deposits were made bigger. Then, additional biomes gained the ability to spawn oil lakes, like deserts do. The way this was implemented also allowed biome mods to specify whether they want oil lakes in certain biomes or not. It's significant because biomes which do feature oil lakes gained a 50% boost in the probability to generate proper oil wells as well. Oceans had the chance straight doubled. And to top it all off, we now have the two oil field biomes, which contain ridiculous amounts of the stuff. Oh, and I already mentioned the oil springs producing renewable oil by spawning in new sourceblocks every so often.
Oh, and somewhat related, refined fuel did see a 20% output boost in 1.4.x over its original value. That was around the same time the quarry got reworked to accept more power to work faster.
You can read in detail about all of these changes in the github commit history, but I warn you, it's a massive list and it's hard to search for keywords.
Apparently they believe everyone has access to a stable Mystcraft oil ocean/oil field now so they made it a requirement to use a boiler or a combustion engine. Seems in Railcraft/BC/Forestry if theres a possibility, even if its extremely rare or difficult to obtain then its made the standard for balancing.
Cynically whining about something generally doesn't help, much less if you didn't even bother to do your homework. If you want people to take your statements sriously, get yourself a source you can quote.
