It's kind of hard to explain, but I think I've done it enough that I might have a straight answer for once.
There's actually a few reasons.
- I prefer seeing everything moving around, like carts.
- I feel it really takes the "sorting" out of it, which is something I enjoy building.
- It's too easy. I'm not talking balance, I'm talking ease. It's actually fairly balanced in terms of expense, because it is a truly powerful mod. But, being able to plop down a few blocks, shove a few storage discs into one of them, and then having tons of storage space just seems... I dunno, too simple.
- The autocrafting is, um, boring. I don't even autocraft very often, it's usually something that requires a ton of steps, but I have to do it a ton (1.5 and before I would always autocraft Carbon Plates and Advanced Alloys from IC2). Like I said before, I prefer seeing everything moving around and doing things.
Mostly, it's just boring. I find everything about it to be dull.
E: And I understand that it is very powerful, and quite cool. It's just not my thing.
Well said. AE is very strong, and not cheap at all. It's easy not in terms of how much it costs but in terms of use. It's not a fun to sort with since you can't actually see things move around, and the autocrafting, while advanced, is boring.
My only counterpoint I can offer is when things are moving around in a way you can see it's harder on the system. So LP is not as light on the system, even though it's more interesting to see everything being crafted bit by bit, piece by piece, block by block... it's more intensive on the system. Moving things around via RC is actually a great choice since it looks pretty cool, works great, and is hell of a lot more creative then using AE or LP, but the downside to that is you can't see what's being moved unless you're moving liquids.
And sometimes, the coolness doesn't win out, as sometimes we have to be careful on our usage. I've seen uncounted people using RP2 to sort everything, and it was visually awesome and yet could kill a system if done incorrectly.
I've even seen a Youtube Video of some people on a server finding why their server was dying because of lag, and it was a duping glitch with a self-feeding set of RP2 pipes, causing an infinite amount of charcoal to appear in a small section of pipes when you feed it one.
So while it's more fun to see everything working, sometimes it's not really an option. Which sucks.