>>24339
To be honest, I was never really into these Tech Mods, but the most popular today would probably be
* Create [1], very polished and more build-focused (less single, overpowered blocks, etc.) with a lot of decoration-stuff too, picrel,
* GregTech [2], basically a _much_ more complex Industrialcraft, vidrel, LOL,
* Industrial-Foregoing [3], seems to mostly be about automating vanilla-stuff,
* EnderIO [4], classic pipe-style tech-stuff, etc., and
* Mekanism [5], bunch of energy-stuff, all based on a single new ore.
Although I personally would be open for playing with any one of them, and you theoretically can pretty much avoid Microshit, e.g. via the PollyMC launcher [6] and the alternative authentication system [7] it integrates, the resulting client software everyone would have to run will always be extremely bloated, slow, totally non-free and just be written in the shittiest Java imagineable. Also, while Ashley seems like a very competent admin, she would probably be the last one on-board of anything that is Craft, and using some system that inherently, effectively elimates any powers a host usually has over the clients (IP-banning, world-save-files corruption/deletion, etc.) would be the best IMO.
Minecraft Beta 1.7.3 introduced the Piston block, already making the, admittedly very weirdly implemented, vanilla Redstone very interesting [8]. The code base is _much_ smaller and there are some nice mappings, allowing anyone to easily strip away more. When I get some time, I will try to produce a statically-linked, native client-only version for my system, using GraalVM.
1: https://github.com/Creators-of-Create/Create
2: https://github.com/GregTechCE/GregTech
3: https://github.com/InnovativeOnlineIndustries/Industrial-Foregoing
4: https://github.com/SleepyTrousers/EnderIO-1.5-1.12
5: https://github.com/mekanism/mekanism
6: https://github.com/fn2006/PollyMC
7: https://github.com/fn2006/PollyMC/wiki/Alternative-Auth-Servers
8: https://invidious.private.coffee/watch?v=W8nfzOzQ3CM