I will miss the marker blocks.. kinda wish that Azanor would just leave them in as decor blocks, like the stained stone blocks. One can hope...
Same here. They're a nice touch, I always found myself crafting far more than I actually needed, just so I'd have spares to use to spice up other (non-golem) builds.
Hmm, it seems like that would be more time consuming way to research. You have to guess which aspects you can discover in the nature and which you have to "combine" to research. It's basically the same as the Doodle God flash game and I never finished that.
But the current research system isn't perfect either. Crucible experimenting is an useless way to research even if you're only starting with the mod because you still have to complete the research normally.
I believe Azanor himself has stated that Doodle God was his inspiration.
I'm not really looking forward to the return of Taint. I mean, I loved the dangerous feel of it, and I did like fighting the Taint...I just didn't like having to fight it as the FIRST thing I did in a world. I hated that no matter what I did, the Taint would spread and spread and spread and eat all my Vanilla ores--and with Thaumcraft's current cross-mod support, I don't doubt for a second that the Taint will eat the modded ores as well. I hope that this time around, Taint spreading will have some sort of hard cap, lest it turn into Mystcraft decay but in the Overworld. :/
Hey, here's a thought: what if Thaumcraft added its own dimension? One that terrain-wise is identical to the Overworld (at a 1:1 scale), but is comprised entirely of new blocks, mobs, and materials. The "Thaumic Dimension" has a lot of nice boons to it, but also comes at the risk of the Taint. This way, we'd still get Taint, but it'd be an optional part of gameplay, and we wouldn't have to fear the Taint Apocalypse in the Overworld.
Alternatively, Taint could be limited to new Thaumcraft-specific biomes, according to the same principle.
EDIT: RE: Research, I would LOVE to see something like this suggestion from another topic:
You know, that could be added as a feature in a much less tedious manner, just make it similar to D&D with schools of magic, give players an option to select a certain school in which you specialise and another which is locked to you, you get access to certain things which are only available to your school and a discount on essentia when dealing with that school that stacks with the discounts from the robes of the thaumaturgist, in exchange you can't craft things belonging to the school you chose to lock yourself out of.
Obviously would only work with SMP (or, instead of "can't craft" it could be "is more expensive to craft"), but still.