XD I know one thing: that you dont transmutate stuff with a transmutation cyrcle I know that much ,but alchemy did realy exist and it defenetly helped. Alchemy was used for medicine mainly and only a little bit on transmutating iron,gold,... AND chemistry was build on Alchemy(if this sentence is a bit wrong I apologize my english knowledge ended there)I hope this isn't a shocking revelation, but in real life alchemy doesn't do anything at all. It was a mysticism-laden fore-runner of chemistry, and 99% of what early alchemists were attempting to achieve was about as real-life feasible as hatching dragon-eggs. Alchemical transmutation, the way the people who called themselves alchemists thought of it, didn't work in any way, shape or form. Movies and games aside, any actual back-in-the-day alchemist believed that it was possible to transmute gold and silver, they just needed to find the philosopher's stone (which also doesn't exist, but they all believed that it did). In the real world, you cannot transmute any element into any other element (watching particle-accelerator-generated transuranics decay doesn't count, and still isn't alchemical-style transmutation).
So if your big issue with a transmutation mod is that it does things you can't do in real life, well...
I don't want to ruin Minecraft for you, but just so you don't hurt yourself you probably should be made aware that you can't carry lava in buckets or carry 64-cubic meter stacks of solid rock in your hip pocket. XD
(Punching trees in real life is also not recommended. ;D )
And you can carry lava in buckets for a amount of time ;D either the bucket will melt or the lava will cool down and get solid