The reason I think that 1.7 will prove itself to be a bit of a turning ground for the community is just because of how the size and timing affected people; there were many people who were chased away by it. Look at how long 1.7 vanilla has been released for. Even forge has had a recommended build out for quite some time now. The number of people who are "stuck" on 1.6.4 has somewhat taken me by surprise. Fuzzzies mod list (
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1210470-Fuzzzie-s-1-6-4-Mod-List) still updates with as many 1.6 changes as 1.7 changes whereas I had hoped for a "drop everything and port" mentality.
Looking at something like EnderIO, CrazyPants was one of the first "big devs" to port and now he is fast on track for new and cool updates. The biggest other one that sticks out for me is the next-gen buildcraft builds; they are absolutely fantastic imho, new shiny textures, and a big push by inspired and talented coders for adding new (wanted) stuff. All this after people had basically ruled it out as being "old-hat" (myself included
...)
There has been a lot of time for new authors to start off with 1.7 and this opens the floor for brand-new mods to walk into the picture. 1.7 forge is nice for if you are just starting off with modding (no block/item ids and the centralized gradle system all clean things up) but it has been a pain for the "veterans".
One thing that I am hoping for the future is less machine based mods (not going to jump quite on the anti-GUI train), but more along the lines of physical additions to the game. Crops is something that can be hugely expanded on. I personally did some experimenting with plants that grew in two stages: the stem and then a bulb on top of that that only needs to be harvested, they looked very cool imho and we should have more of these types of things and less direct copies of the standard 7 stage wheat shaped crops.
If anyone has checked out AE2 (wait what!? of course people have), Algo has moved along from just having screens and such to a fantastic and well rounded experience, the new world gen and the crystal seed growing mechanic are both great additions (there are a bunch of others too...).
Anyways, all this makes me want to get back into the dev environment and keep tinkering