Good arguments!
My counter argument, and in its current alpha stage, its a compelling one: if there's nothing forcing you through "tier 1", nobody will do it. There's no reason to get less-than-optimal nuclear efficiency if you can cut straight to turbines. By removing the cyanite requirement, you're essentially obsoleting their whole passively-cooled reactor mechanism.
That might be true for some players, yes. However, many will choose (as they are choosing today) to stay with a passively cooled reactor design and simply make it bigger, never bothering to setup a steam turbine. There are many reasons why it's this way and many ways to fix it, but I don't believe parallelizing the Turbine will make passively-cooled reactors obsolete.
One way you could make it more *difficult* to build a steam turbine is requiring more experience material, like steel, diamonds, blocks of gold, iridium, etc.,. Hence, you could build an actively-cooled reactor earlier in the game, which is a soft tiering/gating rather than the current hard tiering/gating mechanism.
(Lack of mineable resources, obviously, is never a valid obstruction to cutting straight to tier 2. Unless, I guess, its freaking iridium)
BTW: I'm having fun running my steam into railcraft turbines for EUs
And *that* is one of the reasons I really like this mod and see a bright future for it. It fully embraces *steam* power, which is, IMHO, the only truly universal power medium out there. People bitch about IC2 power (packets, voltage, transformers, etc.,.), RF (it's too easy), and MJ (it's out-dated). However, I haven't heard anyone bitch about steam, mainly because it's so simple *and* it has direct correlation to the real world.
In the real world, the majority of fixed power relies upon steam production and turbines.
