the mr frog dude (martincitopants) has gtnh installed and mentioned he is planning on playing it sometime. i have lost respect for him for saying that, literally one of the worst modpacks of all time (long text post below)
okay so he was streaming himself testing sf4 because he decided to speedrun it for some godforsaken reason. then a polish person donated and asked him to pronounce their name, which i think he failed miserably at, so he made a joke about polish people just mashing their keyboard when naming their kids, and he accidentally pressed alt f4 so the game got shut down, laughs all around, and he decided to end the stream after that.
but he also showed a bit of his desktop, and there it was, an instance of gtnh next to the instance of sky factory 4, in the curseforge launcher
so not only is this dude playing one of the worst sky factory packs, he is using the worst modded launcher, and he also is thinking about playing the single worst modpack ever.
okay so you are probably wondering why i, a literal nobody, can say that gtnh is worse then satan, and it has everything to do with several main issues i have with it
first and second, the gameplay and progression its just so fucking slow pre ae2 autocrafting yes yes, i know that is the point. but when you spend 1k hours handcrafting everything just to get to the point where you can realistically automate everything you need to automate, its not fun at all sure you could technically fully automate rubber and sbr, plastics, base platinum processing pre ae2, but it would need an unrealistic amount of machines, materials, lines, and power, to be able to do all of that fully automated without ae2 handholding you (oh and if you dare use the included gt pipes, people will stare at you as if you killed someone)
even after getting ae2 autocrafting up and running, the gameplay becomes repetetive, need new thing? spam patterns! dont have enough resources? go grab them! not enough power? rebuild it bigger! now do that for 300 hours until you can actually get to the interesting parts of the modpack, like waterline, the compressor multiblock, gorge. its almost as if the gtnh devs have realized that patternspam isnt that fun to do for 600 hours to get stargate, so they make these multiblocks with puzzles attached to them to actually make the player think before being able to just pattern it, but in the end it doesnt actually solve the issue that ae2 magically solves every issue like the gameplay, the progression is so fucking slow, but it is due to the fact that the gameplay is slow. oh you want more then 1 steel every 6 minutes? spend another hour crafting with buckets to make more pbfs! oh you want to make a wood farm? sorry, the good way to get them is still locked, come back next tier!
you might be wondering who the fuck i am, i wonder that too sometimes, but i do know i have had over 1k hours in gtnh, gotten to tank in nomi ceu, beaten gtcp, and generally played modded mc for at least a decade, so i generally know what i am talking about, and i sure as fuck know that i fucking hate that piece of shit modpack. if you really want to try to argue with me, i require that you show proof that you have played past hv in gtnh, which i have done, to show that you also know what you are talking about
third, the influence over the grander community i remember back when gtceu used to get updates (zalgo where is the nuclear update) and i saw a balancing change where they randomly made circuit assemblies (and supercomputers and mainframes) twice as expensive this was the pr btw so i went to the discord server (which i am banned from thanks to the very kind ghostipedia who doesnt know you shouldnt trust people who made agartha and jakub jokes (this was several years ago, before the memes went mainstream) also like we had a deal about getting unbanned, but ghosti just fucked off and blocked everyone (it was a whole ordeal)) and asked why they felt that was a needed change while i was working on some script to revert the change. the dev that made the pull request replied that she "felt it was silly" that the recipes were that cheap, after she had played gtnh with like 7 other experienced players (they reached dtpf in a month), so she felt it would be okay to change the recipe to have parity with gtnh
the current modding landscape is dominated by unoriginal ideas. either it is a vanilla+ pack that barely is different from any other vanilla+ pack, or it is a slop kitchensink pack that someone made for groups of friends to play on, or it is a cookie cutter expert pack that just devolves into pattern spam. and that problem is even larger when it comes to gregtech packs, the packs are for the most part just people wanting to recreate the sheer grind that is gtnh
oh yeah, "play gregtech new horizons" is basically the modded minecraft community version of someone saying "install gentoo" when someone asks about a good linux distro for beginners, but somehow it actually became a thing people started doing, playing gtnh when they do not have the experience needed to actually be able to suffer through the pack
but here is my weirdest opinion. gtnh is actually a polished pack, its a great example of a great expert modpack. every problem theoretically has a ton of solutions. need ores? either go explore the cosmos, do blood magic to spawn meteors, or do bees for 400 hours. need power in iv? HOG, nitrobenzene, and even lightning are viable options if you know what you are doing. you can solve almost anything with several different options (but as i mentioned before, ae2 ties everything in a nice bow) its just that the modpack isnt good, and the influence it has on the wider community isnt good
if gtnh has a million haters, then i am one of them. if gtnh has ten haters, then i am one of them. if gtnh has only one hater then that is me. if gtnh has no haters, then that means i am no longer on earth. if the world is for gtnh, then i am against the world.