I'll risk being the doodoo head in the crowd, but anything I say is meant in the form of respectful feedback.
I'm hoping that with this announcements and the subsequent steps towards the described business model that we can expect to see FTB treated like a business. And by that I'm not talking about effort assembling and maintaining the packs, I'm talking about no longer straddling the fence between mod devs and players. Now the mod devs are the vendors, FTB is the packager, and the players are the customer. And that mans the vendors don't get coddled anymore. If they don't play nice they don't get their own pram to play in with their selected friends. It means if mods or mod suites are technically unstable, they're not included in packs. (Looking at you, Voxel Mods, but not to exclude all the other mods over time that have added very little but detracted a whole lot.)
If I'm now the potential consumer, I don't want to troubleshoot packs anymore. If it's listed as a pack for download, it means it works, and if a mod is discovered after the fact to be unstable and causing issues, it's promptly and prominently announced so players don't have to play private investigator figuring out why their game keeps crashing, or memory leaks keep demolishing framerates. They can disable the mod or take appropriate action.
I'm one of the community members who spends hours tracking down edge case issues that nobody really talks about and for which the answers and solutions can only be found in the dustiest corners of the interwebs. Thing is, the answers are there, but nobody brings them forward. Secret Rooms crashed my game umpteen times and it was only by fluke a found a tangential reference to it causing problems after a couple of hours of googling that I was able to disable it and solve that problem. A mod that does hardly anything worthwhile producing show-stopping issues and nobody said squat.
I don't want to see alpha mods shipped with packs "for worldgen" and then wind up having to restart worlds with the next evolved step anyways. If the mod isn't ready for prime time, it doesn't belong in a pack.
If I paid you for this product, I'd be asking for my money back. If we're to move in the direction of monetization, there's much room for improvement. Many players will spend an hour or two here and their trying to track down issues and resolve them without even stopping to think about what they're doing, but I'm not one of them. I'm not spending any more of my time fixing things that shouldn't have been broken in the first place while you guys are enjoying your all expenses paid convention trips. Now is a great time to refocus on what matters, and it's not making nice with mod devs at the expense of the players anymore. You've got something to offer them by way of monetization opportunities for being part of an FTB pack and that's it. They don't need second chances for atrocious behavior and they don't deserve to earn money off the back of a broken mod.
