When TE first started, you are correct, the "Expansion" in the name was a pun. It was meant to save BuildCraft. Circa 1.2.5, BC was on the way out. I rather liked BuildCraft and didn't want to see it die. Hence, I wrote an expansion for it. And for a long time, I did assume that BC/RC/Forestry would be installed alongside TE as part of the BC ecosystem.
Now, that isn't the case. TE stands alone. Tesseracts are generalized IInventories - they work with far more than BC pipes. RP2 tubes have worked for a long time. CB's translocators. Mekanism's new pipes will work with them. ProjectRed's tubes. ThaumCraft golems even work with them! We provided BC pipe support because it was not an unreasonable request, although funnily enough it was the only one that required us to go out of our way to support.
Keep in mind that TE machines autoeject - so Item Tesseracts serve a pretty valuable purpose even if TE is the only mod. It's incredibly inaccurate to say that other mods are required.
Same with plugins. Yes, you are correct - we add new Turtles if CC is installed. That's because Zeldo happens to like CC. Do the turtles provide a key point of the TE tech tree necessary for advancement? Not even close - it just happens that it is also not an unreasonable request.
MFR interaction? Additional BC pipes? Forestry capsule support? All the same thing. We can support other mods, and it's definitely encouraged. But you seriously cannot balance around the expectation that any/all of them will be present. Though again, we have - we killed a fertilizer generation method when Forestry switched over to 2.0. We've kept fuel values roughly in line with everything else. TE's own machine energy costs are kept in line with (and are generally higher) than IC2's.
You have a lot of good points here, and I respect that. You don't like me? I respect that too.
I agree that mods shouldn't solve all problems, they should enable players to do new things without add arbitrary hoops or creating "grunt-work" problems. The purpose is to elevate the nature of the problems and interactions to a higher level, encourage players to think, and not grab a dozen stacks of rails and hold down a mouse button for a half hour. (Which, btw, I truly enjoy building rail systems, but I recognize that it isn't for everyone.)
