In my opinion, he (Greg) had two choices:
1. Gregtech makes all related recipes/machines/whatelse harder or more in 'line' as he saw fit, but offered configs to finetune each setting to ones' liking, thus creating a more or less hard resourcegame for every single player and/or server out there. This would rephrase GT from a pure gameplay mod to something more config-centered. It could've been expanded onto TE, Forestry, AE, whatever.
2. Gregtech is a vision of Greg, where stuff is exactly as hard as HE always thought stuff should've been in the first place. Configs are only containing more or less general features (like the de/activation of certain machines altogether), but do not offer tweaks about difficulty or recipes at all. This would rephrase GT into a more pure 'hardcore addition for the easily bored who love to grind resources' mod.
Seeing sentences like "I won't add configs to revert changes" makes me think he's more and more on a trip to choice 2: "I'll make techincal MC as hard as *I* want. And no, I do not care if you disagree with me - take it or leave it, spit or swallow!" - which in my book is a turn to the worse, as GT already split the playerbase as it is/was. Hardcoding 'hardcore settings' into his mod will probably only harden the fronts, not convince players to at least give it a try.
Ah well, take it with a grain of salt, in the end, it's just my opinion and neither does it matter, nor will it (lol) make Greg change his mind.