continuing from news thread:
It's so you don't have to keep opening NEI. You can just have the recipe right there at all times.
Since when was pressing 'r' or clicking on an item tedious?
I'm sorry, but I still don't get it. So instead of going back to the item and pressing 'r', you want to exit the crafting table, dropping anything that got put in there, to look at the recipe on the wall? with no item names, only icons? what if two items look similar?
What's more, if the recipe doesn't change according to say, the last recipe viewed in NEI, only displaying one recipe and requiring it to be manually changed makes even less sense, to me anyway.
I don't think people craft any single item enough times to warrant a sign of a single recipe hanging over the crafting table, and if you're crafting anything over and over and over, you generally remember the recipe very quickly through muscle memory.
I can see it possibly being of some limited usefulness when you have someone who doesn't remember recipes easily, crafting 100s of the same item, or crafting chain over and over again.
Or perhaps, if you forget the item you needed for the crafting recipe, and the 'sign' automatically shows the last recipe viewed in NEI. essentially you go over to your storage looking for the item you're missing, and the 'sign' is on the wall near the storage. Still, when you're working in crafting, the last item you've searched for in NEI is hardly far away, unless you've accidentally cleared the search bar, and you only have to hit 'r', right there in the inventory you're looking at...
There's always the aesthetic value of putting recipes on the wall, which i'm sure someone can make look cool somewhere. And there's the "hell, why not!" reasoning, but if dmillerw is making the mod to fill some kind of gap in finding recipes and such, I don't think he's found any gap to fill.