Don't worry, the Twitter stuff is mainly bluster. Tema's a team player.
Fact is, Itemducts are catching a small "nerf" in one sense, but a versatility buff in another.
Being able to wrench modes on them is nice - dense/vacuum/RR/etc - as part of the basic duct; but fact is that it's a limited design. We're redoing the duct system so that individual ducts are simpler, but it'll be easier to add new types.
I'm not saying multi-mode ducts are impossible, just that we're going to take a step back on that one as it's a lot of extra variables to track which in many cases simply aren't useful. Same sort of deal with filters. They're super convenient, but it's another state variable to add to the duct. A filter duct is better, performance-wise. And it also means we can make some super-advanced filter ducts without bloating the memory requirements on every duct out there.
Backstuffing needs a rework because we can't ensure it works properly with all inventories, and there are a lot of retarded mod inventories out there. Instant transmission *might* be a server-side option. Code-wise it is trivial to do.
Also, the rework gives us the opportunity to possibly open up a duct API.
