I do like the idea of "less is more". As said above, there's nothing wrong with adding plenty of decorative block, focusing on say just the railway mod would mean we'd actually make use of it. When I played on the mod server well over a year ago that was one of the things I noticed. There were so many mods there which never had any use.
Exactly. I think every modded server I've played on has had Railcraft on it, yet nobody ever uses the things (same for Steve's Carts) since there are usually much better ways to get around. Both Mekanism and IC2 have teleporters, so nobody even bothers making a rail line at all. Usually people connect via a Nether road early on, but once people start having enough power and resources to do teleporting, they just do that instead. Heck, some of the previous modded servers had the Portal Gun mod, so everybody was able to just warp around using those.
Moded server is very nice idea. You can reach that moment when you have nothing to do unlike building in both variants, but with Extra trees mod it becomes far far later. The problem is mods doing many usual things not necessary. With buildcraft you're doing caving for about 1 hour. There is no sense to explore caves more. But the most significant problem is server overload with all this staff like automation when lags and bugs appear. Then you need just to shut down the server. As for building you have all vanilla blocks in moded minecraft.
I've gotta say that Mirk's last server didn't have any of the lag issues that some of the previous modded servers had. Sure, the framerate around my place tended to get a bit chunky, but that's really more the fault of my style of building than any inherent problem with the mod pack.
And I completely agree with how there's a bit too much automation that is allowed by a lot of mods. You think the Buildcraft quarry was overpowered? Try Mekanism's Digital Miner. You can actually set filters on it so it only grabs certain blocks. For example, I once needed a bunch of diamonds, so I set it to only mine those. It only took about a minute for it to slurp up all the diamond ore in a 64x64 area underneath it, and after about 10 minutes of wandering the overworld and plopping the miner down randomly, I had about 20 stacks of diamonds.
The thing is, I don't think automation is a bad thing in and of itself, as long as it's not too easy to set up. On Mirk's server, I wanted to set up some sort of way to harvest Ender Lillies, since I was always running out of ender pearls. Unlike most other crops, they weren't compatible with any of the other mods' auto-harvesters, so I had to get creative. Apparently Factorization has these things called servos, which are these little machines that run along a track and can be programmed to a certain extent. I ended up spending
days rigging up a system where the thing would go on the track, scan the crop, see if it was mature (which took forever to figure out), and trigger the harvest and re-planting of it, while sorting the pearls and seeds to their correct places.
And you know what? It was
really fun and satisfying to set up, and didn't feel too far removed from vanilla Minecraft's approach to doing stuff: relatively simple components that can be combined to do more complicated things. If the Ender Lillies worked like wheat or other crops, I could have just set up the harvesting of them in about five minutes with a single machine from Minefactory Reloaded that would plug into my existing power grid. Sure, I would have gotten the stuff, but it was more fun to CREATE something that did what I wanted, as opposed to having it all done by a single block.
That's why I'll always be a fan of Thaumcraft. Even the most powerful stuff has its tradeoffs. The method for increased ore processing takes a decent amount of space and causes negative effects in the immediate area. You can automate stuff with golems, but it still takes several of them to do what you want to do. Even dabbling in the magic at all will cause the person doing the research permanent negative effects as of the recent versions of the mod.