I really enjoy vanilla redstone post 1.5.0. Once upon a time it was crazy laborious because you had to use torches to propagate vertical signals (and it introduced huge delays). Now we see insane hipster machines and totally vanilla sorting systems with ha higher throughput than most RP2 systems, and better overflow control.
Yeah 1.5 was great for red stoning. I didn't see the appeal particularly before using RedPower back in 1.2.5, but now I am far more proud of my vanilla wiring. In fact, using Extra Utilities, I created a very compact toggle latch, which make me so proud to have figured out