The guy from our team is busy now, so he can't edit the post to put in the changelog. I will put it in the comments somewhere.
Well, the clay is really a bad quest to complete for sure. We agree, that it is the most horrible of the quests. However, there is another way of getting it - if you look into the recipes for Kaolinite you may find a recipe branch to get the Aluminium from Certus Quartz. You can get the quartz by completing the first AE quest. To complete that quest you need 64 nether quartz... And that is not that much, actually. You can get more than a half of that amount just by decomposing the plates in the dining room+your starting room, even if you are unlucky. The left amount of certus quartz can be pbtained by decomposing the walls the ship is made of - just make sure to chisel the walls into metadata 0 before decomposing. After that use the Pure Certus Quartz to make blocks and craft those blocks back to Certus Quartz(since you can't decompose the Pure Crystals you need to get them back into their original shape). After decomposing 8 certus quartz crystals you should get exactly 32 aluminium.
Or you can try rushing the pulveriser as said above, the recipe is not that hard by that point in the game. Also true.
However, in most quests like that there is an alternative way of doing the quest, the easier path, that requires you to perform more steps. Always try looking all the possible recipes via NEI before trying to do what the book tells. It tells you the basic way, which may not be the fastest and most efficent.