Yeah I think the whole "everything must interact" thing stems from having a modpack mindset. That in and of itself isn't bad, it's just probably not the same mindset as the modder.
Back during 1.6 I had countless people asking me to add Forge Multipart support into my own mods. At first I considered it, but after investigating it a bit I realized it was a major undertaking, would require FMP to be installed regardless of whether the person wanted it, and meant I couldn't update my mods until FMP was updated for each game version (which was a big deal since they were meant to be smaller mods that could be updated quicker than the more feature-filled ones). Not only that, but in Redstone Paste, I had come up with a system to let you use slabs to hide paste and sticky repeaters/comparators within the same block space. I was pretty proud of that, actually, because it further enhanced the vanilla feel of the mod, and did so without a mod dependency. Slabs from mods would work as well as long as they used Minecraft's base slab class.
I had people very happy that I'd decided to keep the mods simple, because they preferred smaller and lightweight packs, or just enough to enhance vanilla without significantly changing it. Yet at the same time, despite explaining my reasoning for not supporting it, and the built-in alternative feature, various people still weren't happy because they couldn't use it with all their FMP parts like they could with the various other mods that were using it at the time. So you just can't please everybody. Unfortunately you still end up feeling like you've disappointed or alienated people. And I'm sure that's only worse for some of these folks making far more popular mods.
But times are always changing. My downloads have only continued to climb, higher than they ever were, and yet the FMP requests nowadays are essentially zero. I'm definitely happy with the choice I made, and it just shows that you can never predict how these things will turn out. For all we know, even RF will vanish in six months. It's impossible to tell. I certainly wouldn't have ever guessed that FMP's adoption would have seemingly dropped off like this, after all.