Lots of the FTB packs are unchallenged or are personality packs or very unique packs (e.g., Horizons) that have very specific purposes.
Monster, though, Monster is a modpack styled as FTB Ultimate was. And many FTB Ultimate players left the FTB ecosystem when its updating got very slow. They left and formed their own packs (me and my friends with RR) or joined other big pack communities (Technic, DNS Techpack, SolitaryCraft, Madpack and others).
While I can't compete with DireWolf20's brand appeal or Jaded's unique sense of shared hardship, I
can compete with Monster. Monster is a big feature pack, and all of its competitors have been practicing and growing their community pretty much for a year with only a few token competitors from FTB.
At this point, it's hard to point to any specific advantage FTB can offer for a big feature pack. The design space is not that big¹ and the real advantages are in testing and balancing. FTB used to have a monopoly on this, but several packs are big enough now that they can sustain a solid testing effort on one pack. We actually have a testing pipeline and a real stable version that's as solid as any FTB pack I have had the pleasure of playing, and I'm very happy to say we're not the only pack that's managed to figure this out.
So Monster, unlike the other FTB packs, faces
serious competition. Because smaller teams can have more focus quite frankly have a lot more to gain and less to lose, we're also happier to experiment. The kinds of players who love monster tend to like how we or DNS run things with a bigger and growing modscope.
¹
Curiously, modpacks are often more strongly flavored by what they emit than what they choose to add. It's one of the reasons we always keep the possibility of removing some well-known mods from the table.
I did and they added gendustry so that's out for me.
Did you see that really big rebuttal thread to your problems with Gendustry on the RR forums? Also, we shipped the version that fixed the bug clearing the ignoble stock flag. I am certainly with you in agreeing that behavior was way OP.
Gendustry makes bees slightly cheaper to start with, but has a much lower max capability cap than extrabees+base forestry. The author says that you should still try and make alvearies, and you still need to be careful how you handle your pristine stock. The industrial apiary is strictly worse than an alveary in nearly every way, and most of the stuff we do use gendustry for was possible earlier with all the frames out there.[DOUBLEPOST=1389671968][/DOUBLEPOST]
It's more like not knowing what items are valuable and need to be stored, and which ones are junk and can be ignored. And when there are LOTS of new mods, you end up filling your inventories really quickly with tiny amounts of inconsequential stuff. Or you toss it, and then find out a month down the road that your progress is blocked because you threw into the lava the *one* item of it's type in a 100 chunk radius.
How often does this even happen?