It irks me a little when people judge my choices in tech trees. I'm working on an aestetic build atm. It requires very basic blocks. Stone, purple fantasy block, chiseled wood, thick glass... etc. Not a very tech heavy need. I'm not really in any rush to the top of the tech tree. I have very little automated except the blocks that I'm using for building. My overworld base is sparse. I have my automated cake farm, my cake eating flowers, and all my other botania stuff. I have my thaumcraft area with infusion altar, alchemy, mystcraft area with my books and ink farm, and my tier 4 blood alter. Not very tech heavy but I didn't feel like going that way. I'm enjoying playing how I want to play. Of course I don't have a big reactor so I have no valid power production. My little 64x lava gens with my mystcraft lava world don't put out that much... I don't have automated AE production. Of course I don't have but enough random items to fill but maybe 8 chests. I do have caches setup for my mob farm but they're all labeled and working well. I have 2 ender quarries that are currently not running because I don't want them to. I turn them on when I need something. one is in the nether the other is in the mining age. I'm hoping to finish the build I'm currently working on within the next 2 weeks. hehe
There's another player on the server that plays the same way. Others have offered to give him boosts in tech but he's declined. He prefers to explore some of the simpler aspects of the game and he enjoys it. I say let everyone enjoy the game as they will.