The only thing the forge devs have asked for is that we support their work in carrying the modding community forward. Lack of enthusiasm and adoption just means we'll be waiting a lot longer for forge 1.8. That's not going to do good things for development side of modded minecraft, and in turn modpacks. straddling multiple versions means a lot of support/backporting overhead. Hats off to anyone willing to play that game, i'm not.
I have seen quite alot of support and enthusiasm for new features and mods!
I often see people go like, woah this is awesome! Ofcourse with the following but: can you backport to 1.6.4?
Honestly, the problem isnt lack of support. Its that not every modder can keep up. A bunch of mods, including some popular ones, updated to 1.7.2 quite fast. They also dropped 1.6.4 completly, dispite 1.7.2 having some problems (holding some modders back to update) and vanilla minecraft going to 1.7.10, wich wasnt even released yet! And before we knew we had a perfectly working 1.6.4 with little mods updating annymore. And why? Then we had a 1.7.2 wich was never going to be "The version". Why the rush?
And this is going to repeat with 1.8. Certain modders have already shown that they want to update to 1.8 asap. Great? I am realy not sure on that one. It would be nice if we can get the broad stable modpacks from 1.6.4 on 1.7.10 before we start the whole cycle of 1.8.x beta builds with a bunch skipping to 1.8.final with more beta builds to stable 1.8.
Honestly, I feel like the mod makers rushed 1.7 and dropped 1.6.4 abit to early. I hope they wont make that mistake with 1.8... I dunno, just my 2cents.