A depressingly large number of people only use RC for two things, the Extractor and bedrock tools, and most of them get those two things via magnetostatic abuse. As someone else said, "most RC tutorials begin with 'make a magnetostatic and set its output to X'".
That's depressing indeed. However - and I'm sure I'll get yelled at by those same people for this - I think the relative ease of achieving ore quintupling in RoC may be a contributing factor in this. Yes, the extractor is tricky to power efficiently, but compared to what you get out of it, it's actually super-easy. I appreciate the anti-grinding design philosophy evident in this, but it was bound to have unintended consequences. I'm sure if TE wasn't so easy to start with, its creators would have reason to complain that people just rush through the tech tree to get to the tesseract. The same with Mekanism and the digital miner. All of these are showcase features of their respective mods with unique capabilities which in other mods, if achievable at all, have significant drawbacks or are much harder to achieve. They all invite this kind of abuse. Also, I have to ask: am I abusing Mekanism if I don't use it to process ores, given that most of its machines are made for it?
I wonder if changing ore quintupling mechanics would improve things. Such as having the extractor take a grinder's output instead of the mined ores directly.
Yes, you can do this, but putting it in the back would be stupid.
Not if you have EnderIO, whose fluid conduits can coexist with its power conduits in the same block space.
Using magnetostatics not for the convenience of RF transport or their power capabilities but merely to try to avoid the need for things like gearboxes, so that they can just pick the power they want and not have to actually think about their builds.
In that case, wasn't the tiering counterproductive? Instead of one engine locked at 2048 Nm, which would require gearboxes for most tasks, you now have several versions, one of which is likely to output the torque you need... also I don't think you could run an extractor with a V19 magnetostatic without a gearbox. But then, I never tried.
I honestly think that the plug-and-play impossible-to-do-wrong style of RF has made a large number of people lazy, to the point where they resent even having to calculate things like power distribution, wanting instead a literal "as long as everything is connected, it works" design. Speaking personally, I would take that level of handholding as something of an insult, as it to me implies the creator thinks that I am too stupid to get by otherwise.
Perhaps TE made it too easy to achieve, but actually even IC2 has this kind of self-adaptability, where machines draw the power they need and not more without the need for the player to actively design power control mechanisms, and things work as long as everything is connected the right way. Getting there takes some design work and you need to understand the basics of the power system and put in a transformer upgrade here , a transformer block there and color some cables if need be, but it is achievable. In RotaryCraft it's either not achieveable, or so much harder that it doesn't make a difference, and for me personally, that's the biggest draw of magnetostatics engines. Here's my favorite example: to make a grinder only grind (i.e. use power) when something's in it, that takes extra design work and several blocks including redstone logic to control the engine and a method of detecting a machine's inventory state (which RotaryCraft inconveniently doesn't provide). A great majority of processing machines in modded minecraft have that capability built in. It's actually RotaryCraft which is exotic in this. Personally, I don't really mind the design work, but I do mind the additional space requirement.
I see it as being similar to when people complain to me that RC does not do what IC2(?) does and literally make it impossible to put items into slots where that item does nothing (like a dirt block in the macerator). To me, that says the developer thinks I am too stupid to realize I cannot grind dirt, and has to force my hand (and the accompanying implication that I will sit there trying one item after another with no comprehension of what I am doing).
LOL, I never noticed the difference. I actually occasionally try unintuitive things with machines, although I usually check NEI first these days, and either X can't go into a machine, then I know it's not made to process X, or it can go in and after powering up it's doing nothing, and then I also know. Also, yes, I see where you're coming from with this argument, but I do not feel insulted.
Edit:
I'm looking forward to using ElectriCraft for power transmission, which has the capability I find lacking in RoC, but the lack of any kind of cover/facade mechanic makes it only selectively useful, basically restricted to industrial-style facilities where having cables out in the open is not a concern.