Changing all the ingot drops to nuggets would help balance chickens out some. I'm not sure why Terrasteel and Gold chickens are the only two that poop nuggets whereas the rest poop ingots. That being said, I've amassed more Draconium ingots from Mystical Agriculture in a shorter amount of time than I've collected a single resource from chickens, even with multiple chickens of that type without going insane. Insane being more than 10 of that chicken type fully leveled up to 10/10/10. This is in part to the Growth Crytals, that were cheap to get started with and whose effects stack so you can instantly grow your entire farm. I have an automated wither boss spawner set to 25 seconds. I can maintain this with a 4x8 farm of Wither seeds surrounded in Tier 2 Growth Crystals. Not only does it support the Wither Boss spawner, but it slowly builds an excess inventory of skulls for crafting over time. Even though the Draconium Chicken was removed from the pack I still have an infinite supply of Draconium. In a week I've harvested nearly 200K ingots for Draconium from a 9x9 farm. That seems a bit more OP than the chickens.
There is a downside to the amounts of resources you can attain. Storing them. Granted you could set up a detector system that dumps anything of x amount but if you want to keep it you're likely going to set up an array of Quantum Storages to try and hold it all. Then you're going to find that the Priority system for External Storage doesn't work right and resources are, once again, being stored on your disk drives. Quite annoying. So then you have to export them all again and in doing so you get the idea of two Refined Storage systems but when you start trying different ways of connecting them you get tired of one controller breaking... *bangs head on desk* While chickens are OP, they are fun and an interesting twist in the game. They also require you to be on top of your storage-game. If you're not and you have loose chickens with drops being picked up via vacuum chests/absorption hoppers you'll end up causing massive lag on the server from all the entities on the ground. BTW, absorption hoppers are the way to go as they will pull items through blocks unlike vacuum hoppers.
There are other benefits to the mod aside from massive resources. The eggs and manure can be composted in barrels to make more dirt. Manure and dirt make fertilized soil - speeds up crop growth. this is especially good early on for growing food faster if you don't have an apple tree. Obviously the OP hasn't fully explored Chickens and Hatchery as he would have noticed how OP vanilla chickens in a Nesting Pen are. Yes, they are OP. Why? Amass a ton of nesting pens, put vanilla chickens in and they output a TON of feathers and eggs. These items can be placed in a Loot Recycler. Output the LR to an RFTools crafter and you have yourself a TON of Legendary loot bags. For free. From vanilla chickens. Perhaps we should also remove vanilla chickens
Overall, I like the Chickens mod. On our server: Not everyone uses it. Some use it as it suits them. Some go hog-wild with it. At the end of the day it's up to each individual player to use the mods in a pack as they see fit. There are always mods I never touch because I either don't they are there, don't know how to use them, don't want to learn them, or don't need them. For the longest time I've played in packs with Big Reactors and I never used it. Take Infinity Evolved. I had a massive lava farm with Blazing Pyrotheum (ugh, the fire spread on that stuff) feeding a field of Magmatic Dynamo's. Yeah, a reactor would've been easier now that I've made one but I just couldn't be bothered. SF3 is also my first time getting into Botania and Mysitcal Agriculture - not just Chickens.
FWIW - I got delayed on my chickens for a while because certain chickens were attainable only through natural spawning and I was in a Deep Ocean biome. The Nether Quartz chicken took a long time to find and then capture without dying. I had to go to other players islands and trade with them to get the Flint and Bone Meal chickens.
