But why would manual mining need to be super effective? It's not supposed to be the method to go to for everyone. If you enjoy manual mining you enjoy it without those ridiculous tools and if you don't enjoy manual mining you won't enjoy it even with those powerful tools at least after a while. Inventory management becomes tedious when you have to do it every 10 seconds.
Because some people would like to stay competitive or atleast have the feeling that there time spend mining was actually usefull? Also, Dartcraft bags takes care of inventory management. Especially when you get the ender variant.
Let's take Fortune for example. Level III is the best way to process some ores already without having better Fortune. Silk Touch for others some depending on if you have GT or not. So why should we have better levels of Fortune available when it isn't supposed to go past III? And it is also a delicate process choosing between Silk Touch and Fortune as needed, with both of them active via DartCraft armor you can just ignore everything and blast away everything without even caring what it is you are blasting exactly.
Why do we have macerators/pulverizer? They go beyond vanilla in adding fortune to iron/gold/copper/etc. Metals where not supposed to be affected by fortune yet these machines allow it! Crazy! (I am actually serious here, if fortune IV/V is OP then so is the macerator/pulverizer).
Then there is also the vanilla reasoning behind fortune vs silk toch. Space. Redstone dust for example wich quickly clutter your inventory, but silk touching it to mine it with fortune later saves massive amounts of space.
And the point about player commitment is debunked with Quartz Grindstone. The only thing you are doing with that is using yourself as the fuel and it's even slower than the Macerator or Pulverizer. So manual grinding is less effective, why make manual mining better either? Besides, is there really anything you can do manually that is the most effective way? No, and you know why? You can build automated processes infinitely but you are still only one person.
The Quartz grindstone, just like the clockwork engine, are meant as starting items. Just like your first pick is a wooden pick. The dartcraft tools are midgame, where as the drill/T2 TiC are endgame. As for what i can do better manually, everything untill you upscale automation beyond reason. As it stands alot of the automated farms already provide all you need in there smallest format. Something you can easely keep up with with manual farms. It starts to go crazy when you make huge farms and end up with "hey i got a million of X and everything else".
Dont get me wrong though, i think the power drill is not balanced. But the problem here lies with IC2 and its exponential power system, huge storage spaces and the Armor suits basing there energy system around it.