GregTech is the main reason I play Mindcrack instead of the Direwolf pack.
I don't think there is anything wrong with Industrialcraft, per se; just because various different mods insit on one-upping each other with yet more unreasonable amounts of yield increase and other such things doesn't mean that an existing mod automatically becomes bad, or that it should be required to somehow "defend" itself by one-upping its contenders in return. Too much of a good thing most definitely can be bad.
Look at Thermal Expansion - it began as exactly that kind of thing, just another mod that one-upped IC2 with a better macerator, Buildcraft with better energy pipes, and so on. I was very glad to see King Lemming and team CoFH get a firmer grip on the vision they were following, and nowadays TE is an invaluable mod not because it does the same things better (as most of the sore points were brought in line), but because it does interesting things that other mods don't do, and in a very cool manner to boot.
Where does that leave IC2? Much on the same level, really. It still does interesting things that you don't find in other mods. It allows me to build well-balanced teleporters so I don't have to rely on super-broken mods like Portalgun and Mystcraft for fast travel. I can defend my base with tesla coils, not because it is the cheapest option but because it is one of the coolest. It allows me to spend days agonizing over a good reactor design, the game within the game. It gives me power tools and a freaking laser rifle and a lightsaber and a cheap yet relatively limited, mid-game personal flight option. It gives me a mutable form of matter than can fill my resource shortages, no matter what they might be. It gives me an energy network that's still less aggravating to manage than Buildcraft's, even after all that TE did to level the playing field. And it still makes the strongest armor in the game, especially against the Wither, which is fast becoming a requirement for progress in multiple mods.
And it allows me to play GregTech. I have come to enjoy this mod for more than I thought I would, based on the initial glimpses of the very unfinished version in Beta Pack A. It has grown and changed more than any other mod since then, and nowadays I don't want to miss the way it ties all those separate mods together into a coherent whole. Configured properly, it gives you a reason to run the IC2 and Buildcraft worlds side by side at the same time for maximum efficiency. It makes sure that all machines output the same types of dusts and ingots so they will stack properly in your chests and can be used for all recipes. It gives purpose to all of Redpower's useless worldgen (yes, even nikolite), fixes a ton of exploits, gives a challenge to those who desire it (and lets those who don't dial the challenges back by a large amount), gives you building projects so ridiculous that even multiplayer servers full of infinite energy loops will take weeks to tackle them; and most of all, it gives you a single, unified and scaling multi-mod tech tree to follow from the first TE pulverizer you plop down all the way to a massive Redpower-managed factory put together like a puzzle from at least six different mods that were all developed independently from each other.
