Its that kind of thinking that drove Algorithm away from modding. I think the channel system is great and its funny to see disorganized people like Direwolf20 struggle with it. Its basically the only new feature in 1.7 mods that makes me not want to downgrade to 1.6.4
I have a high tolerance for mods with difficult mechanics. I avoid ExU as it it cheesy in the extreme, am annoyed by my early game dependence on TiC. While there are conversion options in direwolf20 I generate EU and RF via their own mods.
Why am I annoyed by the AE2 channel system?
For a couple of reasons: Foremost is p2p. The channels imply a data limit restriction on the cables. And then p2p steps in and lets you tunnel channels over channels over channels to violate basic principals of physics. If operations over p2p tunnels took longer or had some other cost, that would make a lot more sense to me. As it is they just make no sense.
But, with P2P discarded, what left. Limited channels. With no mechanisim left to expand the capacity of the network. So channels force me to P2P, which I object to, so I object to channels.
And, as a software engineer, they look computationally expensive to implement. So we have a mechanisim ina mod that already has a reputation for hitting server tps hard, and it makes itself intentionally difficult and offers a computationally expensive way out that is unbound. Its just bad engineering. There had to be a better way to add depth to AE that doesn't encourage players to murder their servers tps.