I never get into Witchery as I've never seen the payoff, or understood the progression... How does a small investment start making my game easier, such that I can increase my investment over time. Thats the process by which i've gotten into Thaumcraft, Blood Magic, Botania (As far as I have), Thermal Explosion, Big Reactors, Ender IO, Tinkers Construct, Industrial Craft, Applied Energistics etc.
I don't get that with Witchery. I make some mutandis. Get the saplings for the trees. Plant some trees. Go on a building binge making stuff with the unique wood textures. And then... get confused and move to a different mod.
Well you can become a werewolf/vampire now, so there's that
But I agree Witchery does seem a little "pointless", unless you know what the mod can do (which I don't)
For those saying that using out of mod contraptions to automate, might not have seen last season of forgecraft where dire was using botania to automate botania, and somebody else on the server on up'ed him on this by invisibly automating botania, so that nothing showed but the flowers.
Not to mention that if you are playing a mod pack, it is sort of an unspoken rule, that mod interactions for automation are pretty much a free for all... if you use 8 mods to automate 1 thing, who cares? As long as you didn't feel like you
had to do it the way you did, and you had free choice, then it's fine.
Modded MC, when it comes to tech mods (almost all "tech"/"magic" mods are tech mods), is all about automating tasks, and in some cases being efficient.
And Botania is one of the nicer mods when it comes to production/automation, as it has a variety of ways, and you can choose what is best for you.
For example, with Thermal Expansion, the "best" method for getting RF, when playing just vanilla + the mod, is the Magmatic Dynamo. However, that is impossible to automate, so your only automatable option, really, is the Steam Dynamo.
Whereas Botania allows you to automate a lot of the flowers when you just play Botania + vanilla, and you have a lot of possible flowers which you can automate to the same degree as the Steam Dynamo. Endoflame is pretty much the same (you just have to add a fuel into a hopper every now and again), Gourmarylls (same as the Endoflame, but instead of fuel, it's food... and if you have a decent mob farm, you have infinite fuel - rotten flesh, heck using this you could say it is 100% automated), Dandelifeon is automatable... doesn't mean it's easy to do so though, and probably others, but they are probably ones I haven't used.