Whats the least "cheaty" engine to run

[Physicist]

I see why you're finding some engines cheaty: Ender tanks and tesseracts. Stop using them. Use pipes/liquiducts, pumps/aqueous-accumulators, and mining wells; the key to non-cheatiness is having infrastructure requirements and effort involved. To echo part of what Namae said above, consider nixing aqueous accumulators, too, since they appear to make the water move with magic.

You could even nix long-haul pipes, since Railcraft has tank carts.

 

[Physicist]

Now that I re-read your initial post, you seem buildcrafty but not industrious, so try converting most of what you do to Industrialcraft tech, (except pulverizer/inductionsmelter almost always > macerator). It has many options for your power grid, (be warned, solar panels feel pretty cheaty after a short time), and where needed you can convert EU to MJ via Power Converters (in Unleashed, not DW20), or Electrical Engines from Forestry.

Also, when you get around to Nuclear Reactors, read the IC2 wiki article in detail, but avoid looking at spoiler images from other pages that give you instant knowledge on the safe designs. The risk in acquiring the knowledge is the best part.

As for long-haul power, it's interesting to pack your power into high voltage lines from an MFSU, then step it down to useable power at destination.

 

[MigukNamja]

The common problem with a strict self-ban on teleporting/remote energy, items, and liquids is chunkloading. If no teleporting and few to no chunk-loaders, some choices have to be made:

1. Big base builds which may lead to client display update load/lag
2. Forced smaller base builds to avoid (1)
3. Lots of chunkloaders, which may cause server issues
4. Chunkloaded moving stuff, such as carts with the chunkloader upgrade, but I believe the server engine doesn't handle moving chunkloaders well. Please correct/update me if I'm wrong and someone's chunkloaded transport device is stable.

In a perfect world with a perfect client and server game engine and with infinite computing resources, we wouldn't have to worry about it, ex: all of the explored map would be chunkloaded. I'd love to have my turtles drop 1000m+ of pipes and cables to connect my oil fields and remote bases to my main base. However, we don't live in that world, so some difficult choices have to be made.