I agree. While I'm staying in 1.7.10 for the foreseeable future, I'm still keeping an eye on 1.9 and hope that modders will begin to at least try to update to 1.8 soon. Supposedly updating to 1.9 after 1.8 will be easy because of relatively few internal changes (compared to 1.8).
That's the thing though. For the countless modders who refused to update to 1.8 for one reason or another to begin with, nothing's really changed significantly. 1.9 has the same mechanism in place for direct block rendering, which Mojang still takes advantage of with fluids just like 1.8, and that Forge likely still won't allow modders to use, so it'll be the same song and dance of modders all piling hooks into the same spots (who can blame them). World render hooks likely won't go back either. EnumFacing still doesn't have an 'unknown' direction, which was a sticking point for some modders like TeamCoFH. Meanwhile, anyone who used Forge's custom model format changes might have to redo their models for the 1.9 changes unless they merge it all together in workable way. Hell, even 1.8 items in the vanilla model format are currently all going to need changes made to their models unless Mojang fixes scaling issues between 1.8's builtin/generated base model and the new items/generated that all 1.9 items use, which will make it a bitch to maintain two versions.
I mean there's still a lot of changes under the hood, several of which I've mentioned
over in this thread. But unless the new content and vanilla changes to models is enough to pull modders over, then 1.7.10 might be here for even longer. And it's a shame, since 1.8 and 1.9 aren't inherently bad, it's just that the former has never been allowed to live up to its potential due to unnecessary restrictions imposed by the API. I don't know why that would be any different moving forward.
