Efficiency is one of those words that always makes me cringe slightly when applied to gaming. I game to have fun, not be efficient. I am efficient at work. I drive in an efficient manner. I mow in a certain pattern because it's the most efficient way to cut the grass.
I game to get away from all that. I play to be stupidly unrealistic and over the top. It's most efficient to play D&D with a sword and board fighter. I'm busy dual wielding candlesticks.
Too many LPer's say: We're going totally over the top with this project that needs huge amounts of power/items/fluids. Yet instead of doing something cool with it, they just thump down a Tesseract and move on. Efficiency lacks style and flair. I do understand that in some cases, such as on a server, you don't want to be running immense trains around. But Direwolf for example, has no excuse, since he's running on a dedicated server. He even said he was going to use Railcraft more this season, and then how does he harvest an oil well? Ender Tank.
I am often saddened at the creativity lost by the drive for 'efficiency'. Oh well, at least Etho is blowing himself up with HS Rail.
@KingTriaxx gave me a great idea. What ideas do you have for over the top builds? What's the most ridiculous build you've done?
How would you move things around if you couldn't teleport things instantly with ender anything or tesseracts? If you had to have sugarcane grow only in a tropical type biome? if you could only grow wheat in a planes biome? If you had to have so much space per animal to avoid complaints from MACM (Minecrafters against credulity to mobs)?
How over the top can you go? hmmmm