Curious then: How would you recommend powering the various forestry farms without wasting fuel? Usually a forestry farm has a lot of time sitting around waiting for things to grow. Running an engine constantly isn't very efficient.
How about automating the shutdown-process? In this case running the farm for a short time every few minutes should be enough if the engine is strong.
Actually Gregs does something that is although unbalanced the totally right thing. It increases the power of Generators and Geothermals. They are both totally OP, but what they need is some effort to automate. I normally shut all my farms down if the chests they put their products in is full. If the chests are full they send a redstone-signal, which activates a timer (it is set to about 5mins) so even if the chest loses some stuff the engine will shut down for 5mins and after that it restarts (unless the chest is still full). I only use electric and magma-engines... and this works pretty well for the electric ones, not so good for the magma-engines.
It may not be the cause of the FTB server-cient config msimatch, but the fact that GregoriusT made the mod assuming that Forge had ID resolver built in. Which is stupid. I don't know if he's fixed it now, but the fact that he did it in the first place is stupid.
Edit: Fixed spelling errors caused by my phone's tiny keyboard.
Forge has ID-Resolver build in, but not all Forge-Mods use it, but they can enable an auto-assign much like redpower did.
There is suff that are ok, like steel for the drill, but need a compresor for ore blocks/glowstone? That is totally useless.
The glowstone makes sense. But for ingots into Blocks you would need to smelt them. On the other hand there is no real use for the compressor so it normally idles if it isn't making diamonds, alloy or netherbrick. And even then Compressors are cheap and don't consume that much power. If you really run into storage issues the blocks reduce the required storage-space by the factor of 9... it's pretty obvious that this should not be free. I agree that it is confusing, but a FTB-Wiki would most likely solve such things.
I do think that certain items should be not as easy to get. But considering normal solar panels and their power output there is no need for making those more difficult to attain. One panel gives you but 13050 EU/day. You'll need 3-4 days to fill one batbox. With the greg adjustment you'll need to get a complette assemblytable up and running plus the laser to fuel it and the centrifuge to obtain all materials.
The only things that changes are the Silicon-Cells and the carbon-stuff. Not sure why you need an assembly-table. There should be an explanation how NEI works since a lot of people seem to not understand it. You need two circuits for the solar-panel. You have the choice which you want to use (BC, Forestry, IC2, Railcraft).
I have to agree that there is a distinct difference between difficulty and tediousness. A game should, reasonably, be difficult without massively affecting the level of tedium. Some features that are enabled add tedium without increasing the difficulty of the task. One example I can cite being the requirement of steel for an IC2 drill.
This is not difficult. You can compress netherrack into nether brick and collect magma cream without massive difficulty. In the end its just adding tedium to a task without making it inherently more difficult. Something I really don't agree with.
The requirement of steel does not add tedium... put Iron into a Blast-furnace and it becomes steel. I don't see how this is a tedious task. The blast-furnace is placed at a later point in the techtree but he already implemented his own electric-blastfurnace so that you don't have to hunt blazes for it anymore. But the Mining-Drill basically is a Diamond-Pickaxe that can't mine obsidian and the chainsaw is stronger than a diamond-sword (10 damage... diamondsword has 7). They were much too strong for early-game. If you have railcraft installed you need a blast-furnace anyway at some point. And if you have it, it is not really tedious to put some iron and charcoal in.
There's a fine line between challenging and unnecessarily convoluted. If something is meant to make a process more involved, it ought to have a gameplay benefit. Complexity for complexity's sake is a poor reason to change the game. I don't think the old recipe was too easy considering it was ONE standard solar panel. It takes 512 of these things to make a HV array with Compact Solars. Making them using the centrifuge is crazy because it takes like 20 minutes to spin out the pair of silicon cells for one solar panel. I'd have more fun setting up a logistics pipes network to make solars than having a centrifuge running for 170 hours.
Actually no one limits you to a single Centrifuge. They are not that expensive and they don't use much EU. You can run 6 with a BatBox. Since Sand is very abundant it should be easy to provide them with lots of them (if I remember correctly sand only needs 500 Seconds). You could even use Dirt to get Sand, which would make the process more time-consuming.
I think he actually want to remove the basic-solarpanel because it causes so much server-load since it creates a lot of singular EU-packages. So the Solarpanel is only there to be used for the advanced solarpanel. And it is pretty cheap considering this. Well it actually does not cost that much more, it is just moved to a position at which you might rather construct an advanced solarpanel instead of 8 normal-solarpanels. I'm not sure if there is an alternate recipe, but the ultimate hybrid-solarpanel should only use a single or 8 basic solarpanels... but since you need a lot of UUM anyway producing 2 or 16 silicon-cells wouldn't matter that much.
You need 18 Iridium-Plates and 18 UUM for an Ultimate Hybrid-Solarpanel... (or 16 Plates and 48 UUM with the alternate recipe using 8 Hybrid-Solarpanels).