Here's my attempt at re-creating something I went through last night:
Okay, so I was building a really large room. Dimensions were 16x16x6 (where Z is up like it should be).
I dug all of it out, crafted about three or four gem picks to get the job done. Good. That was fine. A Destruction Catalyst would've made it easier, but it's fine.
Then, it was time to make the walls and floor. I wanted them to be out of stone brick, so I had have (Still haven't done all of it. Got bored of Tekkit somehow and went to play Mafia Madness instead.) to smelt some stone.
In the electric furnace we had (Which was all we had the ability of having at the time--EE being disabled really stunts your progression rate.), it took about seven minutes to smelt a stack of cobblestone.
Not to mention that because we have to manually acquire materials, we can't afford decent power supply, so the power storage keeps running out, and we have to spend more precious materials for progression like coal and redstone to fuel it.
Now let's do some math here.
16x16x6 room. This means the floor and roof are both 256 blocks, and the individual walls are 96 each. This is EIGHT HUNDRED NINETY-SIX stone.
896 / 64 = 14.
Fourteen stacks.
Seven minutes per stack.
Ninety-eight minutes.
Which sounds more fun:
Waiting ninety-eight minutes for 896 stone to smelt and then crafting all of the materials you need
OR
Making just one set of stone bricks, then transmuting the rest of the amount of cobblestone into it
Which sounds less tedious:
Waiting around for seven minutes for a stack of something to smelt with nothing else to do because we don't have the proper materials to progress, and to get them, we'd have to go for hours into mines for the fifth time, and then having to manually repeat the process thirteen times
OR
Waiting about thirty-five seconds to smelt four cobblestone and then turning the remainder of the cobblestone into stone brick (Same EMC value, because they're equal in matter. 4 cobblestone -> 4 stone -> 4 stone brick)
This is not rewarding. This is not fun. This is not good. This is not how gameplay progression should be. This is tedious. This is bad. This is NOT fun. This is NOT good. This is horrible.
Eventually I tried to find something to do to pass the time, but in order to get the job done quickly enough, the smelting process required a good bit of my attention. I was making lamps, and I had to go out in the night to hunt down skeletons, which conveniently seemed to stop spawning right then. So I had to go waaay away from home just to kill some skeletons with no guarantee that I'd get bones when I killed them anyway.
edit:
There is a very apparent majority vote that EE is integral to Tekkit. Not to say you're a bad host, but a host's interest should be to please their playerbase. This is common sense. Happy players, happy server, more players, more popularity, etc.
Your obstinateness shows either that you are unaware of this, or that you simply don't care enough.
edit:
I understand how in some cases, doing things the hard way can be more rewarding, but this is an example of where doing things the hard way is NOT rewarding. It just makes me want to rip my testicles off and kick my dog.
I should probably just be patient, and normally, I could. But when I know there WAS an easier way, and that it was intentionally removed, that gets thrown out of the window.
Poll