I try to keep my mouth shut on GregTech ('tis better to be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt), but messing around this week has me pondering a bit.
First off, I have to admit I was rather disappointed to hear that Ultimate included GregTech "hard mode" (which is a relative term to denote it's more difficult/tedious than regular implementations of IC2, but it also isn't "poopsock mode", with changes to the block breaker recipe and such). It's not so much because I can't/don't want to handle it; it's that I manage a server with friends and some of them would rather not deal with it. Funnily enough, playing on a server with a bunch of people with degrees in CS yields a bunch of people who don't want to mess with their configs to keep up with server-side configurations, so the packs lock us into what we'll be using (only server-side config tweaks I do relate to server-controlled functionality: frame block limit upped to 2000 to support my enormous "chasm bore" fetish, square forestry farms because the people doing that stuff are too lazy/preoccupied to tessellate diamond shapes). I am fairly sure the sentiment for a number of server maintainers is we don't want to deal with having to distribute special snowflake config files when the pack was supposed to be "the way" to do this in the first place. Mod packs are supposed to make it easier to click and play, if players are required to handle more steps than that you're eroding the usefulness of it being a mod pack.
This week when updating (because I always wait a week or so on pack releases to see what shakes out; usually that stuff's resolved within 48 hours anyway but I'm paranoid, lazy, and also somewhat busy otherwise) we discussed what we wanted to do. We were running Direwolf20, but we were also chomping at the bit to play with Applied Energistics and 5.2.0 didn't have it yet. The usual "I'm not really feeling up for GregTech" sentiment cropped up, but then of course realization hit: with the truly massive amount of resources we had on hand, plus the automation added from Applied Energistics, GregTech "hard mode" really would be trivial at this point (it might've throttled us slightly early on when I had 3 BuildCraft quarries running in tandem, but I've gotten pretty rote and zombie-fied in handling the GregTech process up into making Titanium now, so maybe not so much). Not to mention the pack has bloody Power Converters for god's sake and we have an ungodly number of 36HP boilers running at all times now.
And that's the part where I giggled a bit. Why the hell include GregTech "hard mode" and then throw in Power Converters, of all mods? Who knows, I almost think the pressure to get "something" out the door hit and that's just what we happened to end up with.
Personal Theory: It may also relate to whatever internal cataloging system the mod pack team uses for handling concordance on their "FTB Team" configurations; have you noticed the configs included with the Direwolf20 pack that are for mods not actually in that pack, including basically everything in Ultimate? Yeah, I'm getting the impression that their way of handling centralized configs is to just include the same set with every pack at this point since there's no harm in including configs for mods you don't actually have installed.
In-launcher options would be very nice. I'm not certain how they can elegantly implement that. If my theory's on the money, they have to figure out a branch system for disparate configurations before they can even think about it, though.