Well, I finally finished getting all the wools, and I did like the ^4 areas much better than the first set of areas, mostly because they required me to actually think about how to deal with the spawners and stuff instead of just trying to plow through hundreds of ubermobs with underpowered gear.
Early game, I did some serious quality-of-life and efficiency changes to the base so I didn't waste power on unnecessary AE items. I got rid of all the unnecessary ME cable and controllers, and built a tiny AE system right next to the door to the spatial areas. I also gutted the spatial IO port room because I got sick of having to travel anchor there and back constantly. I rerouted the cabling to the observatory so I could quickly change areas from there. I also put a toggle bus on the spatial stuff so it was only active for a split second when I pushed the button because all that dense cable was chewing through a dense energy cell pretty quickly. I also dumped everything from the reactor and rebuilt it in the observatory so I didn't have to keep going there to turn it on and off. Later on, I filled it with cryotheum of course.
I skipped quite a few places in the early spatial areas, like the middle floor of the biosphere and the witch water floor of Nether Sphere and came back to them after I had uber gear. I actually still got killed in the biosphere even with the powerful rapiers i had. I cheesed both nether spheres because I wasn't about to charge head on into either of those messes unprepared.
The ^4 areas were more fun than the early areas, but the last few areas after those just didn't feel like they were fleshed out at all. When I got the insane lag spike from popping in Keeby's I thought MC was going to either crash or run like 2fps. Surprisingly, I was still getting about 30-40fps, but the tickrate went in the gutter fast. Florbs were literally taking 10+ secs to spawn the pyrotheum after hitting something.
I used the legendary bags there to make legendary seeds, and spammed fluxed crystals to death until I had over 300 legendary bag seeds growing at once. Hint: breaking the fully grown crop instead of right clicking gives 2 seeds most of the time, but only if you break it with an item in your hand, otherwise all you get is a single seed and no chunks. Legendary bag spam got me the necessary cookies for an angel ring right around the time my 128 interaction upgrade cobble gen hit octuple so i could make a torcherino. I then kicked on the reactor and let it waste some fuel till I had some cyanite (I barely touched the reactor up to this point. I only had to run it like 3 times up to that point).
Once I kicked the fluxed crystals farm into overdrive with that torcherino I started mass-spamming almost every seed in existence except a few useless ones (like theobromine, spatial io, feathers (gives 32767 dmg value, which makes them unusable in any recipe), and a few others like dirt and cobble). I also upgraded my pick to an unbreakable tartarite from wooden, and spammed it with speed modifiers using some of the 700+ creative modifiers I had from legendary bags. I also made a pair of tartarite rapiers and spammed them with as much sharpness as I had nether quartz for. I cleared out the nether spheres at this point to get necrotic bones and put Life Steal XI and Looting III on both.
At that point, I stopped using armor altogether as Life Steal XI is essentially god mode as long as you have a steady stream of mobs to chain hits on.
Overall, Miners' Delight^4 was the most fun. It was a nice change from the typical deathfest that most of the early areas were. FYI, Dense Ores is what causes the ridiculous lag in there. I tested by grabbing a few stacks, unloaded the spatial area, and placed them in the observatory. FPS plummeted after about 3-4 stacks of various dense ores were placed, and went back up as I broke them.
Reds was super easy, as was the trips through the overworld and deep dark. The nether was easy to cheese, but I decided to try a death run collecting all the spawners just for fun and to put those rapiers to the ultimate test. I managed to get all the spawners and take out every single wither that spawned with only one death, and no armor whatsoever for the entire run. The only reason I died once is because I got distracted for a split second and lost track of the wither I was fighting. It killed me within a few seconds.
For those interested, here's the stats on the pick and rapiers:
http://questwizard.net/mc/uberpick.png
http://questwizard.net/mc/uberrapier.png
I haven't finished all the quests yet (I skipped useless garbage like oreberries, theobromine seeds, MP-only stuff, etc., and I'm still missing 3 trophies from buffers as well as the boni bacon. I did do octuple cobble, 100k charcoal blocks, and 1m sugarcane though, as those were super easy and quick. I could easily do the others just by afk'ing for a while.
Charcoal was kind of hilarious to watch: Autonomous Activators + Autosmelt Lumber Axe + Lata = Obscene quantities of charcoal and XP extremely fast. Good luck automating the collection of all those drops though. I tried and finally just started running around with a magnet and wireless terminal because it would have taken far too many vacuum chests and hoppers or annihilation planes.
I'll probably go back at some point and finish up the last of the quests and check out a few community areas I haven't been too yet. Looking forward to messing around in ME^3 now, since I haven't played that one yet.