That's a lie, a dangerous lie. After BuildCraft 3., pipes have never constituted more than 1/3 of the codebase. BuildCraft has never been about logistical infrastructure, BuildCraft Transport is just one of the modules that happens to provide infrastructure.
Really? Tell me then, what exactly do you do with Buildcraft other than logistical infrastructure or automating overall tasks like the Quarry, Filler, and Builder? Because I just can't seem to think of anything.
None of them, just like BuildCraft, target infrastructure directly (except Thermal Dynamics, now with the recent TE split, and Tubes!): Project: Red/BluePower focus on wiring, Mekanism and Ender IO focus on machines.
Which does not change the fact that they have niche overlap.
A couple thousand? Let's see...
BC items despawn after 1200 ticks. You cannot possibly have more than 1 entity stack dropping per tick. A couple thousand would mean you'd have to be dropping items from 6+ pipes simultaneously and constantly, meaning you had 7200+ items to begin with. Also, install either AllTheItems or CoFHCore to fix the lag issues stemming from dropped items. Or lower the BC item despawn time, which is configurable.
The fact that they drop items into the world at all is a world-destroying bug just waiting to happen. And instead of trying to fix this by using any of several options of overflow management, you call it a
feature. Yea, no thanks. I don't mind exploding machines if they get wired wrong like IC2 had back in the day. I can recover from a crater in my base, even if that crater takes out a chunk of my resource storage. Recovering from memory overflow is a touch harder.
No. BuildCraft never tried to make logistics easy. It never tried to make logistics instant or thoughtless. It never tried to make machines a triviality. Going in a direction which puts the end result above the journey is separate from BuildCraft, which puts the journey above the end result - which is what, in my view, a sandbox game should be about.
Again, you miss my point. Buildcraft is really only used for one thing: logistical infrastructure. Everything else in the mod supports that. The entire laser/gate code is designed to build on that. The entire energy infrastructure was built to support auto-mining and the filler, but really found its niche supporting the lasers, which again goes back to the logistical infrastructure,. It all boils down to that one niche.
BuildCraft Robots, Builders, Fillers and certain up-and-coming machines would like to express a sincere LOL.
Really, now. Robots are simply a slightly more complicated way of 'automating all the things'. Hopefully you won't go as far as CC did with their turtles, however whenever you start getting into 'fake players', you end up breaking far more things than you fix. Fillers are simply used for rapidly clearing spaces or building DW20-esque building shells. Builders are the only thing that you might possibly have a point about, but even then it's automation of a repeatable task, which can be done several other ways (I still enjoy my in-game 3d printer that uses RIM and block dispensers to create works that I made).
You want a LOL? I wish I could provide one. I'm just sorry to see you arguing the wrong topic. Here you are trying to argue that the mod doesn't do what it manifestly does, providing knee-jerk responses to the wrong stimulus, and completely ignoring the more fundamental problem. I only wish I found it funny, but it is decidedly unfunny to me.
Apparently we have different basic conceptual definitions, so it is clear that we are not going to be able to agree on anything which requires those basic conceptual definitions to be referenced. You say you see a sandbox... all I see is a logistical infrastructure with a very roubust support and a couple of tools to give it something to do without relying on other mods.