No explosions means you can use a 'weaker' pipe to throttle back power to certain machines.
(so you can have a forestry multifarm on the main line and not worry about it sucking down all the power)
Power loss isnt too noticeable either, 36lp boiler at sea level (y64)could run a MFR bore at a good whack (y128)- total pipe length about 100 units (gold).
That's because there is no power loss in conductive pipes. None. Zero. Nada. Only wooden pipes bleed power when their internal 1,500 MJ is filled up... at a rate of about 1 MJ per 5 seconds. That is 0.01 MJ/t that only happens if there's no way for the power to go. And of course if an engine inputs more than the pipe can hold, that is lost as well (yes, you can now let your steam engines run 24/7 without worrying for them to stall).
There's seriously no reason to use anything more expensive than a conductive pipe anymore, unless you want to transport more than 256 MJ/t along a single line (because diamonds continue being kinda valuable). They make perfect early- to midgame solutions, which is a huge step up from the utter uselessness they had in early 1.5 and before. By the time you have the energy throughput to overload a gold line, you should be well capable of producing a more expensive upgrade, like a conduit... but the important part is, there is absolutely no downside anymore to using the pipes up to that point. Or for small side installations and outpost bases.
I also managed to build a sort-of-MJ-storage system with them, when instead of industrial steam engines, I build commercial steam engines on my boilers in my last map. Twice as many engines meant twice as many wooden conductive pipes. And then I added some more engines, so that not all of them ran at full speed, for even more wooden pipes. With each of them buffering 1,500 MJ, that gives quite a bit of buffer storage. I had 24 wooden pipes between three 12LP boilers, for a buffer of up to 36,000 MJ. That's enough to burst out a handful of autarchic gates really quickly even if you have a lot more lasers on your assembly table that you can normally provide constant energy for (and the lasers themselves have a buffer too). As a result, I didn't need any fancy-shamncy max size HP boilers that wasted 99% of their output except for those five seconds per day when I needed a burst.
Always fun to see people who haven't even used a feature to call it "terrible". It just shows they haven't recently allocated any time to reshuffle their prejudices
P.S.: Forestry multifarms don't need to be throttled. They never needed to be. They will only ever consume exactly as much power as they need to, which is 20 MJ per block worked. It's the
old Forestry farms that gobbled as much power as you'd let them without giving you anything in return. The multifarms were introduced precisely to address that issue (among many others).
I've been powering two different farms - an arboretum and an orchard - off of one hobbyist steam engine. That still had power to spare of its 1.6 MJ/t output, because the multifarms are just that frugal.