First let me say I love Agrarian Skies, it's a great pack and adds a lot of depth to the game by making things harder. Of course in just a dozen or so hours of playing I can be pretty far. I do dislike the fact I can't let my game idle over night, but that's the theme of the pack.
But... Why do I have to use the Smeltry in order to progress down the tech tree? I personally hate the smeltery (Tinkers is ok, but the smeltery sucks) and have had nothing but trouble using it. I don't like Smeltery and never have and never will. It takes up a ton of space, is slow and not worth the time or resources invested in it (for me anyways) to use. I can build something the is completely automatic and looks a ton better a lot more easily. Not only am I forced to build the blocks for the Smeltery(I can deal with that), but I am forced to build it to make this stupid casts.
And what does it unlock?
Stuff that appears completely unrelated to Tinkers.
Jade... Please make it so the tech tree has branches so you go down the Tinkers tree and it unlocks Tinkers stuff and not other stuff I wish to do the quests for. Otherwise I have to build a smeltery, learn how to use the dumb thing (which never works for me) only to immediately remove it from the map once I complete one quest.
Right now I am stuck on the Learning Skyblock Quests until this gets fixed.
The other quests I am doing but they take a long time for the majority of them (Compressed items), and the food items don't really appeal to me as I can just eat a ton of baked potatoes.
And please don't say you should learn how to use the Smeltery it's great, etc, etc... I don't care for it, I like small nice and neat things and it's none of those. It's clumsy and I don't see the need for the tools it produced especially in this pack were your tools level up. Also I have watched a ton of youtube videos previously to learn it and I tried to make one on my old Agrarian Skies (pre-quest book) and I couldn't get it to work there so I have given up on it out of principle of wasted time and effort.