Technofirma 3 (1.9)

[Beavelguy]

So, with Terrafirmacraft 2 in development, and the update to Minecraft 1.9 hanging over my head, I have decided to redo Technofirma from the ground up! Since I am doing this, I'm curious to know what you like/hate about the current version of the pack, what mods you like/hate/ignore/use, and what mods you want to see added in future. This information is useful so I can refine the pack and make it better, keep in mind I do have an idea about how I want Technofirma to be, and can say "no" to any mod/feautre change that I don't agree with (the power of tyranny!).

Edit: a (not very organized) list I whipped together of mods I am considering/will be adding/want to add: http://pastebin.com/vJT7jEFM

Your feedback is appreciated, 
thank you,
dex 

To me the current strength of the pack is the diversity of tech/magic you can use... the weakness is the amount of stuff that doesn't work or where implementation was never completed. So for example, we have mekanism which is an awesome mod, but it's more or less used in here just for the pipes (maybe the pump) and none of its crazy complicated ore processing (which is what it's known for) gets used. For those of us who have been playing for a long time, we know which parts of which mods work... a new player who gets excited because the modpack has mod "X" will get frustrated that they can't do "Y" which is the reason they like mod "X". There's also a lot of resource hungry bloat like the stellar sky mod and animated chunks... they're cool mods but they're disproportionately resource hungry considering they add nothing to the gameplay itself. I think two examples of mods which are particularly well implemented are Immersive Engineering and Electrical Age... they're kind of both critical to your tech progression. But you never really need to get into IC2 or Mekanism unless you want nuclear power or pipes. I think I would honestly scrap both of the latter, and if you wanted to add a reactor mod do something cleaner like big reactors *or* keep the IC2 and integrate its machines into the tech tree (I get that Big Reactors is overpowered but by 'clean' I mean it doesn't add anything besides the reactor stuff for players to get confused over).

I do love that there are tech routes and magic routes. There are some cool transportation options with transporters and the lowered tier for railcraft (although I keep finding myself putting it off because it's still quite expensive). One thing I feel like the pack is missing is storage, but we do have logistics pipes so that's probably me just being lazy and not building a logistics pipe network  Would love something like Applied Energistics for end game, but I don't think that's being developed for 1.9?

There are a lot of mods I disable because I have to for frame's sake or recording's sake which I would otherwise use (like Weather 2, Hardcore Darkness, Stellar Sky etc), but the only mod I always switch off because it makes the pack too easy is peaceful surface. I feel like it's unnecessary... Like if you want the pack to be a peaceful pack it can be built that way from the ground up with alternate recipes for mob drops and hides and stuff. Totally doable, but a mod isn't required to achieve what a player can already do by just switching the difficulty to peaceful.