Redpower 2 is kind of off in a niche of its own, and its tech tree isn't really what I'd call "getting started." The guides needed for it seem beyond the scope of this and would cover how to make and use the gates, and how to use the tubes and item management devices. Redpower 2 is designed with variable complexity depending on how far you're willing to dive into it, and covering all that complexity is... daunting.
I would have to disagree, My early game is dominated by RP2, and with the new additions it is even moreso. The sickle is normally the third or forth tool I make, and by 2 or 3 hours in it is the most frequently made tool too (because I keep breaking them from use)
I'm making the assumption here that things such as going on a mining expedition for basic mineral resources, tools, armor, and so on are already understood and don't need to be added by me to the order of operations suggested below, folks can mine when they darn well please.
Also to note building your first house out of redpower basalt is a really good idea, and redpower gems are really useful in letting you stretch your other mineral resources instead of wasting them on making more picks and such.
make a stone sickle, use the sickle to mow down grass to get your first wheat and flax.
make a hoe
plant the wheat and flax
while waiting for those to grow, quickly amass saplings and wood using a tree-farm (manual tree-farm, not forestry) aided by the sickle and an axe (duh?)
iterate the growing of flax for a while until you have enough to make a seed bag, this speeds up the planting and harvesting of all seeds by a-lot
iterate further to get forestry bags and/or redpower canvas bags (grow flax to get string to make canvas, and wool to make forestry bags etc.)
once your bags are made harvest everything, clean up your site, possibly make a spawn protection building if you plan on using Mystcraft later on and falling down a star fissure, and get ready to move
Now if you want, you can take everything you got with you, vis-a-vis the canvas and forestry bags
NOW go exploring to find a location better suited to build a base in
Once you find a suitable base location your first order of business, assuming you have already found resources to make bronze and brass (easy peasy), and you have iron and redstone is: make a deployer, find a cow, make a bucket, get infinite milk to fuel biogas engines and run your early stage buildcraft powered machines (1MJ/tick, requires lava to start, but goes forever with a single deployer, a cow, and a bucket). At this point I switch to relying on forestry and thermal expansion (prior to gregtech I would normally make a macerator first and then ignore the rest of IC2 until I worked through forestry and TE) I still rely on redpower for item logistics though, logistic pipes are good for that too, but I like redpower tubes better.
I used a similar strategy in 1.2.5, and I was always the king of resources soon after a server map restart back when I had a multiplayer server I visited regularly.
To be honest we could also use a guide for Redpower2, and i second the notion of general ease items, that dont particularly affect ores, but make life easier.
I hope this satisfys what you were looking for
Also of note, once I'm far enough in TE I generally start my factorization setup and redpower really helps in the automation there too, factorization routers in conjunction with redpower tubes are amazing!
EDIT:
I completely forgot to mention! The redpower alloy furnace allows you to put broken tools into the furnace and gives you the minerals you used to make the tool back. this is really useful early game for resource conservation, and useful later on for melting down the picks and boots of those annoying units that drop them in the twilight forest, plus the gold tools that the dryads drop.
also early game keep a Athame on you to take care of endermen, it requires on silver ingot and a stick but kills endermen much quicker until you get midgame with a IC2 chainsaw or similar.