Ok, heres some more input for you. First of all, I won't use your mod pack. However, the reason is not that I am not interested in it, but I created a quite similar one a week ago. In particular, I also removed Computercraft, Factorization, Industrialcraft and its extensions, Redpower, and Portal/Gravity gun and Equivalent Exchange. However, I did include Forestry (thats a must have mod for me) and also some magic mods like twilight forest, mystcraft, ars magica and thaumcraft. Mystcraft mainly because I don't want to destroy my main world with mining, otherwise I could definitely live without it. Twilight forest for exploration, although I haven't really done much there, again I could live without it. Same for ars magica: Its spells looks awesome, but I didn't use it so far. Thaumcraft is another one of my must-have mods, that I would never want to miss, but I think it has a quite restrictive license.
I also included Bibliocraft for aesthetics, all the details it adds are quite nice. BetterStorage is added as well, for two reasons: For use until AE and because it looks nice (which I can't say about iron chests - that looks pretty boring, even if its arguably more usefull). Finally, I have Natura (incredibly awesome for very early gameplay and super nice worldgen - I guessed it slipped on my "must have" list of mods), and tinkers construct (again, nice to have until I get MPS - I might even remove MPS since it feels a bit to overpowered for me - not sure yet).
Note here that also early gameplay is very important to me, as I usually try to progress slowly - right now I play the
R2R Challenge, where this is taken to the extreme. Anyway, I think some of the early stage mods can add greatly to the game, even if their functionality gets superseded by other mods later in the game.