Mods use items like Blaze Rods and Ender Pearls as balancing tools, relying on their rarity to prevent the abuse of abusable mechanics. Consider RailCraft's World Anchors, which require Ender Pearls as fuel to limit server load. Consider Thermal Expansion's Liquid Tesseracts (or Ender Chests), which can provide infinite MJ and infinite EU via Nether lava with very little infrastructure. These mod authors chose Ender Pearls---not four Iron Ingots---for a good reason: to limit the impact of these powerful features.
And then EE3 comes along, and utterly kills the Ender Pearl as any sort of balancing mechanic whatsoever.
Ask yourselves: What do you have more of? Gold or Ender Pearls? Diamonds or Ender Pearls? Even better, multiply your stock of Ender Pearls by four: How does that number compare to your stock of Iron Ingots? Any one of these questions should starkly illustrate how absurd a 4:1 conversion rate is. Perhaps more viscerally, what makes you groan the most when you see it in a recipe: four Diamonds, or four Ender Pearls? What about four Gold Ingots vs. four Ender Pearls, which is the actual EE3 conversion rate?