I've been messing around with mystcraft a lot lately and find that it is super useful, and if your lucky and remember to find the library in every age you make, even if it's a sucky age, you can find things like nether quartz blocks. I have a age full of tons of nether quartz, it's practically endless.
My starts have been:
TC tools/smeltery for ore doubling
Manual mining(A cheap iron hammer will get a lot of work done) and working toward getting to the nether
Right up to here you're doing perfect in my opinion, but I would like to make a few suggestions that I think you will find are much faster and more practical.
make 2 ender tanks(for lava), a pump setup with redstone engines and a chunk loader for the nether (my personal server)
and know you are ready for magma dynamos and basically infinite energy
You may want to rethink this. At this point you're probably only powering a pulverizer and furnace, take a look at survival generators they are super cheap, connect direct to a machine (you can connect one gen to each side of a mchine, or multiple machines to a gen) and can be used later to power a lava pump. In the meantime you can be mining for enough coal and yellorite to get a basic reactor started. In my opinion there is no reason to even run dynamos. You can make as small as a 1 core reactor that will out power several dynamos, is easier to use and maintain and can be expanded easily. I used to build one right by the quarry above ground before I started setting up the quarry's right under my base, now i set them up right below the reactor, then start making ender IO energy conduit to run when I move it until I have tesseracs, I usually have ender chests by the time i've moved it twice, but I can reset it 3 times barely moving it and leaving space for my outfeed inventories. No more waiting for daylight and dodging mobs to check quarry
(Recently learned about thermal expansion piping, I things they are lot better then buildcraft pipes)
Thermal pipes just came back after an absence to reconfigure the mod. They used to fall under TE. now it is its own mod. It still seems to be a bit glitchy and Ender IO pipes are vastly superior once you get enough ender. I havent used BC pipes in years. Even extra utilities pipes are better, which is what I used to use early game till TE pipes came back.
this will let you power your quarry and from there you can move into AE (Remember you need lots and lots of chests, diamond pipes for connecting everything and possible some void pipes for cobble/dirt to manage the quarry output)
Try using barrels. Run pipes off the quarry chest and put another overflow chest at the end of the run. I generally run dirt, cobble etc to a trash can after filling a barrel or two. The barrels allow you more time to do other things instead of constantly emptying chests or worrying about overflow, and you can swap full barrels for empty (using a dolly to pick them up, these also pick up full chests) and run a barrel of ore at a time through your processing system if you want r store them till you get a better system up.
This is what i consider my early game.
From there you can work toward all the better things. My latest server I've actually been able to completely avoid IC2 (which I've come to hate) Thermal expansion/Forestry will get everything you need done, and is much more manageable imo.
My next step is finding a permanent base locations and setting up my first reactor.
Yes, IC used to be amazing and fun. The macerator was a game changer, I'm not sure but I think it was before TE. IC in general completely changed modded minecraft for me, I used to love making the water wheels and figuring out how to get the max power from them. UU matter, reactors, loads of fun . Then along came greg. However TE took the ball and ran with it, and now we have Ender IO which greatly expands things even further.
Also, take a look at BC for planting and harvesting.