Yeah, shortly after you can make a Quarry you should be able to make that upgrade, to keep the IC2 Miner competitive. I'm pretty sure he said he'll never add a silk touch machine though.
That makes sense. He already added a rock cutter tool (silk touch drill), so he could just set it up so you use that as the drill bit for the IC2 miner if you want silk touch.
Actually, has anyone worked with IC2 miners in FTB Ultimate? Just curious if the FTB team adjusted the config to grab all the other mod ores or not. One of the reasons I didn't use them before in private modpacks was I'd have to manually take down and add all the custom ores from other mods into the IC2 config, to tell the miner what to mine.
It looks like the miner config in FTB Ultimate is set to: S:valuableOres=14:3, 15:4, 16:1, 21:3, 56:5, 73:3, 129:5, 200:1, 220:1, 221:1, 246:1, 247:1, 688:1
Which I notice doesn't include Gregtech's ores at least (they're 2001 in my setup, and I didn't change any IDs), so that means no tin, no copper, etc.