I agree. As someone who's is an avid Thaumcraft fan, it is really tedious. So tedious to the point to where I haven't even touched Thaumcraft fully since maybe May. However, I am slowly starting to grow old of Botania as well. I've played with it so much, to the point it's starting to grow mold. (See what I did there?) It's just the same mechanics, with the same tedium. (Not that Botania is tedious) Modded Minecraft has just become this huge spiral of tedium, perfectly displayed by Avaritia, which is why I like it so much, to even rank it is one of my top mods for 1.7.10 (Despite it not even it being fully released yet). Modded Minecraft is nothing but numbers, now. How much output can I get out of this one ore? How big can we make this node? How much time will it take to generate this much mana? It's numbers down a long rabbit hole. LMT is even a big contender to this. I didn't mean to make it as grindy as it is. I was thinking more so about balance rather than actually gameplay, and I committed the cardinal sin of making my mod a huge rabbit hole, rather than actually making a kick ass mod.I have nothing against the current way its done, except that it doesn't fit very well with replayability. When you're restarting a server, or playing on a new server/modpack and starting out on Thaumcraft for the 27th time, it really feels tedious at best. The problem is that there's a set list of items that you can scan to get most if not all aspects and a set number of combinations to complete most of the researches that you will encounter. It's a great system when you're playing the first few times but after that it just feels like a pointless exercise of repetition, which I don't experience when I am playing mods that establish progression based gating through in-game crafting (unless you count nested crafting, ugh) and infrastructure setup.
For example, I've played through Botania a few times, but setting up the Runic Altar and crafting my first set of all the runes for the first few times when I'm making the different flowers and baubles does not feel like pointless repetition, strangely enough. Maybe I'm just annoyed by having to do the pointless repetition while staring at an interface rather than doing it in-world.
Minecraft in general is starting to grow old as a whole for me. I been experimenting with other mods I haven't either played with before but even then, it's still Minecraft, no matter what mods you have, it's still the same game. I think after I am finished working on LMT2, I plan on taking a long break from Minecraft as a whole. Play other games, do other things. I plan on also working on LMT2 as get new ideas for items, or feel the need to fix things that need fixing, or making adjustments to mechanics that are to overpowered or not fun. Speaking of which, it should be released soonish, and I haven't been very good about the git hub thing either, as I am still trying to figure it out. I'm new at this, okay? D: