By the way, I didn't mean I was going to stop botania entirely. Just look away from it for a decent amount of time until I actually have something I can do with it. Perhaps I should've been clearer. I would still like that someone would fork botania and add in their own content while I'm away from it. It might just be what the mod needs as I feel like it's stagnating recently.
My opinions and suggestions:
Personally, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for creating Botania. It has been an amazing mod that I have greatly enjoyed, mostly because it went 'outside the [magic] box'. You generated concepts that I believe future mods will be using in releases to come. You have significantly contributed to the minecraft modded community by releasing your efforts, and I recognize all the blood, sweat, and tears that comes along with any sort of project like this one.
By nature, I'm something of a 'powergamer'. Back when I played D&D 3.5, I broke the game. I was a member of the CharOp boards, created horribly broken things that are completely legal by the rules, and lost interest in it entirely after I created four separate builds that could deal NI damage per round to NI targets (and one of them didn't even use magic to do it). So when I tell you that Botania is one of the most balanced mods I have ever encountered, I want you to realize how monumental that statement is. Yes, there are synergies with other systems that can get out of control (Blood Magic + Regen IV comes to mind), but it is about the most difficult to 'break' (in terms of creating insanely powerful things without first investing the proper resources) mod around. You didn't give in to peer pressure and create redonkulous stuff for popularity, you created a fun and entertaining mod that held together.
More importantly, you created a mod that was fun to play with, yet was difficult to automate, which I had thought was an impossibility. While there is a steep resource investment, there isn't a real need to grind out hundreds of any given item that can only be created manually, at least not in any one project. If you had about a stack of livingwood and livingstone, you pretty much had the basics required to make practically anything you really wanted to without needing to wait for any kind of timesink, assuming your mana production was up to the task.
Now for my suggestions:
Go into bug-hunting mode, rather than feature-releasing mode. Don't try to make the mod bigger and better, spend your time grinding out the little bugs and glitches that occasionally get reported. Maybe some minor features to go along with them. As far as I am concerned, you've got a mostly finished mod. Maybe work on the API and let others build upon your work. Who knows, you might be the next BC or IC2 that spawns all kinds of addons to it. You've got quite a lot of creative room left around your mod that others can explore. I know if I knew ANYTHING about Java coding, I'd already be writing an addon for Botania.
