I love Transfer Pipes from Extra Utilities, with goodies flowing. Can watch them for long time. I love ender chests and tanks. Tinkers Construct's smelter and crafting tables. Open Block tanks. Translocators. Hang Glider.
They are alive, they have clear concepts and they show what is happening.

Some or many other machines, starting with quarries and to mills, macerators, electric-laser thingies and all others I haven't even seen - they are like deus ex machina. One block with no external animations does whole lot of work. Speaking metaphorically, gray block covers all your needs in this, black with green sprites - in that, black with a green square - and you don't need to do anything anymore.

Still some advanced blocks (new for me) are quite awesome - a saw table I saw at TC building, DOM's rotating mill wheel and the huge propeller (but it bloody levitates! ). On the previous server I saw some nice end-tier designs at J's base: the deep laser megadrill "from Half-Life", the ringish energy reactor (thermonuclear?) ...

So I can't quite understand what makes me uneasy about these "deus ex" blocks, but they surely do.
I don't like all those super-powerful crafting grids and digital ultra storage, or even 4-block quarry (quarry, pump, energy src, dump chest). One blocks contains half of the game. Maybe I just don't understand their complexity and beauty. And, haven't finished even transfer pipe-based storage, I am actually doomed to repeating mundane operations like resources logistics and processing, instead of "fire and forget" as e.g. J does (everyone actually. J - because I was more frequently on his base on the last server).
I feel those super-systems are like another Minecraft inside of Minecraft. So it is like I don't play Minecraft, I first have to make a smaller Minecraft inside, so it will work a lot instead of me, and only then I should play the remaining ordinary Minecraft.
Or maybe it is a mod development quality, or maybe some mods are made by extravert people who like appearance a lot, and some by intraverts, who like complex functionality more ...

What do you think guys? Have you ever had similar feelings? Which do you prefer? What do you think about those silent mega-powered one-block devices?

Oh, and I know that all the animations makes server laggy, thats why transparent pipes are bad, etc.