Right?!
How does not everyone seeeeee this, it's unbelievable. FCHS everyone's centered on the bloody furnace GUI like it's the holy grail of modding. It's been around since modding and it's not exactly hard to come up with something different and the GUI's are as often as not completely pointless.
So WHY. It's completely incomprehensible for me WHY three quarters of the machines out there are just a furnace interface. Sure, sometimes there's two inputs, sometimes there's two outputs, or four in a cross, sometimes energy is fuel, sometimes it's coupled with a crafting bench. And yes, I know that if you simplify every process know to man, it's just mats + fuel + time = output, BUT that doesn't mean you SHOULD simplify every process into this. You know what I hate? Multiblocks that are in fact just an inflated single block furnace GUI. This goes completely against why building in Minecraft is fun. Building in vanilla minecraft is fun because you have a swath of simple blocks, with simple functionality, which you can connect to make wonderful contraptions. Proof is vanilla mobtraps, piston elevators, piston doors, redstone computers, railway systems - your call. Building a rigid 3x3x4 structure to do something as extremely simple as using coal to turn one iron ingot into one steel ingot at a time and call it a blast furnace feels like sacrilege to me. This could have been so much more fun. Instead of fun we have a big slow furnace everyone hates, bravo *slow clap* bravo.
You know why RP was fun? Because Elo "got it". That's why there were block breakers and block placers and frames and stuff. So that you could move and shape and change by creating and moving and shaping a giant contraption in the world. Because you could see things move and work and just be giddy with excitement at seeing your clockwork baby making its first giant steps.
We really gotta return to this. The tedium of using steamroller-tank-can-opener-sledgehammer single block machines that make your coffee, do your homework and give you a BJ to do the simplest of tasks (like driving a screw) is starting to drive me nuts.
Couldn't agree more being given the pieces and then designing a complex overengineered creation to do what you want was why RP2 still hasn't been equaled sure some parts of it have but the current best Frame replacement just does everything for you, no need to figure out where why and how to cover\strip\wire\connect, it's also why TE is good the machines themselves are great but the ability to customize the i-sidedness lets you build systems to do what you want them to.