The original intent of MFR was never to be an excessively complicated mod. It was designed to automate the tedium of tasks from vanilla. Farming, breeding, drop gathering, wait times for mob drops, and XP gathering are all vanilla time sinks. MFR was designed to destroy the time sink so that you could do other things.
Below is the mod description from the MCF post from 2011.
What is MineFactory Reloaded?A way to automatically farm plants and animals, as well some new rail tracks! With this mod you can set up a completely automated farm for any of these things that requires no real work aside from collecting the harvests and reloading the planter, without incredibly complex and unwieldy water/piston solutions. And you can milk cows to death or otherwise run livestock farms if you need those resources. Oh and it has conveyor belts too. http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic...d-power-converters-and-more-updated-dec-19th/
At no point was MFR designed to be a high tech mod. Like most other mods it was designed and balanced against itself. Some may find it boring, fun, simple, etc. But to compare it to another mod as a reason to classify or demean it is rather unfair. We have to remember that mods are largely designed to be used by themselves. It has only be recently that mod packs, large numbers of mods cobbled together, have become a trend. Most mods are far reaching in functionality because the intention was that you'd use only that mod.
Now if you don't like or want to use a mod, that's your prerogative. But remember the context of a mod's creation and it's intended goal. When you look at what MFR aims to achieve, it's SUPER successful. For that matter so is Compact Solars. I never bash either mod anyway.