Barrels aren't meant to be anything terribly fancy, we couldn't think of good uses for them beyond cheese, pickles, soy and maybe booze. Honestly there's nothing terribly fancy about it, you put something out to sit long enough and let fermentation/brineing do it's thing ! The mechanics weren't complex because the block itself isn't very complex, there's not much you can do with it beyond wait until it's done, somewhat like a crop (save that it can spoil). We just gave it a couple fancy looking models.
The good news, Sasha and myself, while playing the BlastOff! map pack were blown away to discover that our mod was actually being used ! Like, completely forgot what we were doing and nerded out for a solid 10 minutes while our supplies of water slowly diminished. So that's inspired us to work on it again.
We're still working on the the big content pack but it looks like a lot of fun. Right now it's mostly crops we've got done (Lots and lots of images, and Sasha comes up with them all on the fly, no "borrowing" assets so we don't have to deal with copyright stuff.) Planned to go in is lots of fun dairy stuff (Mostly "realistic" methods of making various cheeses, from milk + rennet to the final product), lots of natural ingredients ( We have sugar, sure that's easy, flour makes sense, but how about Starch ? Probiotics like yeast ? etc.), and LOTS of use of the ore dictionary to mix and match foods to get some fancy completed dishes.
In the meanwhile,
https://github.com/kawaiiwolf/kawaiicrops/issues is the best place to report probems/crashes. A handful of squashed bugs were reported there and already fixed. Here's probably the best place to add feature requests. Think to yourself: "If I was stranded all alone with no access to the supermarkets, how could I make ..." . If you couldn't do it with the available tools/methods (We've got steaming, boiling, frying, grilling, drying methods for cooking alone ! Ontop of minecraft's default "baking") that's a good candidate for the next update.
So, without further delay ...