Perhaps I could reword what DoomSquirter has been saying, because I think I understand and agree with his feedback, but it seems to be misunderstood.
If I understand correctly what he was saying, and perhaps worded a different way, most custom modpacks with drastic progression changes use HQM to inform the player of changes and guide the player through the tiers/bottlenecks of the modified progression. I'm assuming your pack has a pre-determined custom progression because many times in this thread you have made statements like "disabled *machine A* because it is too easy, so use *machine B* instead." Likewise, by modifying recipes/configs, and taking out machines to create that custom progression, you ARE creating a bias toward what you would use (or want us to use). For that reason, you shouldn't expect a new player to figure all of this out on his own, with the only way to find information on the packs custom progression being hunting through all of the posts on your forum thread. Changelogs are even nice (I didn't see any, maybe I missed it) to read through to figure out the changes and direction you are taking the pack, but as DoomSquirter mentioned, HQM is often used for this purpose. Ultimately though if you don't want to create a complex HQM quest tree guiding a player through your progression tiers (Which is what I believe you are trying to avoid), then I do suggest adding as much information as you can written into a book or as HQM quests outlining important custom recipe changes and disabled/altered machine blocks, simply to keep player frustration low.
As for the HQM questline that you do have in the pack, the pickaxe detection doesn't seem to work (wooden binding/wooden tool rod/flint head). Your first questline jumps from flint tools straight to metal ones, completely ignoring the fact that the user needs a forge to make that. I would suggest adding in forge creation steps, as that is a pretty major tier lock in tcon. But in all honesty when it comes to Tcon, I'm not quite sure why you don't just include the tcon books (are they disabled?) and skip the HQM Tcon quests altogether.
Also, if I understand correctly, you want to use HQM as a means of writing a getting started guide? As most of your quests have no rewards, why not just set them all to be rewardless, and make every quest "auto complete"? That way there is no screwy completion detection problems, and all steps are visible from the very start. That would allow a player to skip sections he knows and go straight to the spots he doesn't, without it being locked behind sections he doesn't want to bother with. That seems like one way of turning HQM into a getting started guide book instead of a quest book.
