Slightly? Hah! Also I was only giving one example of recipes that are changed, and there are a lot of mods that aren't tweaked, mostly the magic mods. The automatic version of IC2 machines are from Gregtech, they are better at first, before you can afford overclockers as they auto-output, similar to TE machines. Once you can afford overclockers, you can just craft them back and forth with no extra cost. What reason is there for Quarry+ to be on easy mode, compared to all the other auto-miners, which have been balanced (apart from Steve's Carts, the Arcane Bore, and IC2 Miners)? It's more powerful than the Digital Miner, whose recipe has been tweaked to be balanced too.
What TPPI offers is a balanced gameplay, not just a whole bunch of mods tossed together and expected to work. Lots of stuff has been tweaked to make sure that you can go down any tech tree and not be forced into the cheaper/more efficient one just because it's easier. In that sense, I guess it's designed for SMP where lots of people are playing together and doing different things but getting the same result, e.g one player may be using a Quarry+, whereas one may use a Digital Miner, but they both pay a fair price and got a fair output.