Some questions, and looking for suggestions on which mods I should use now.

Thanks, sometime after I asked, I found a forum post about the 100 hU, 1 mB/t and 0 bar, but I hadn't known about the steam turbine (or do you mean the kinetic steam generator? I checked in creative mode and I can't place a steam turbine as a block). However, I finished making the overclocker upgrades I wanted, and I have pipes full of distilled water, so it might be a while before I need to make more.

I had to make new steam generators a couple of times after leaving them unattended, though. For reference, is there a way to auto-detect when a steam generator reaches 100% calcification so I could make it cut the power to the electric heat generator before the steam generator gets destroyed?

Okay, I ran into some annoying bugs in Millenaire 6.0.0pb2 (one stage of a creation quest got stuck at 24/25 progress, and later an inter-village raid seemed to get stuck with the raiders still there several Minecraft days later, rather than finishing as a success or failure; edit: there was also a lumberjack in a lone building who continued to respawn even after I used a wand of negation on the building, and he continued to try to plant saplings in midair after I'd cleared a large area (which included that building) down to sea level), so I'm again re-adjusting mods. There is apparently a beta version of Forge for MC 1.8, but too few of the mods I'm interested have updated to 1.8 yet, so I'm sticking with 1.7.10 for now, and Forge build 1232 (since build 1233 apparently introduced a strange conflict with Optifine that makes a lot of mod-added blocks disappear or even act like x-ray blocks)

Here are the mods I'm fairly sure I'll be including:
Advanced Genetics
Applied Energistics 2
BedrockLayer
BuildCraft
Forestry
GenDustry
IndustrialCraft 2 Experimental
MapWriter
Mouse Tweaks
NEI Addons
NEI Plugins
Not Enough Items
Optifine
Peaceful Plus
Railcraft
Too Much Loot
Too Much Rain
Treecapitator
Waila
Waila Harvestability
Wawla
World State Checkpoints

There are also some mods I'm having trouble deciding about now:
Advanced Solar Panels (possibly as a way to get iridium (somewhat depending on the results of the poll I posted about that), possibly as a way to get power, though there are alternatives for both of those)
Compact Solars
GregTech (I've got a different monitor now, so the black granite might not be such a big deal, and if I remember to think of it as more of an overhaul than an add-on to IC2, I might be better able to accept the nerfs, disabled recipes, etc.)
Tinkers' Construct (I liked the idea of the knapsack from this mod, but I've decided I like Forestry backpacks better; the gravel ores and oreberry bushes might still be good, though)
Twilight Forest (mainly for the uncrafting table, which provides an alternative way to get silk wisps for Forestry backpacks, and would allow me to convert Railcraft steel armor and tools that I find in village/dungeon chests into steel ingots)

Some suggestions regarding what to enable or disable in the configs for some of these mods would be good too.

No replies after 4 days? Have people put this thread on an ignore list?
Anyway, just in case anybody cares, I did some more research and decided to go ahead and give GregTech another chance, and I skipped the other 4 from my uncertainty list (though I could add them later if I find a need for them, since none of those are heavily reliant on worldgen blocks in the overworld). I think I kept the GregTech config mostly at defaults, except that I disabled explosions from rain, and I disabled most of the worldgen stuff from mods besides GregTech, except for AE2 certus quartz, since I had read that GregTech certus quartz wasn't usable in AE2 recipes. I also disabled most of the BC/AE2 facades, since they tended to clutter up NEI and I had no real interest in using them, and I deactivated the NEI display of mob spawners, since they tended to cause lag when I was sitting on the inventory screen with the NEI search bar empty.

Okay, I've decided to consider Advanced Genetics and Peaceful Plus overpowered, and I'm adding GregTech and Thaumcraft plus some cross-functionality mods, so now I have the following jar files in my mods folder:

appliedenergistics2-rv2-beta-8.jar
bdlib-mc1710-1.6.5.52.jar
buildcraft-6.4.1.jar
CodeChickenCore-1.7.10-1.0.4.29-universal.jar
ExtraCells-1.7.10-2.2.55b85.jar
forestry_1.7.10-3.4.0.7.jar
gendustry-mc1710-1.4.8.65.jar
gregtech_1.7.10-5.07.07.jar
industrialcraft-2-2.2.684-experimental.jar
magicbees-1.7.10-2.1.22.jar
mapwriter.2.1710.1.jar
MouseTweaks-2.4.4-mc1.7.10.jar
neiaddons-mc1710-1.12.4.16.jar
NEIIntegration-MC1.7.10-1.0.7.jar
NotEnoughItems-1.7.10-1.0.4.83-universal.jar
OptiFine_1.7.10_HD_U_B5.jar
Railcraft_1.7.10-9.5.0.1.jar
Squeedometer-mc1.7.x-1.0.3.jar
Thaumcraft-1.7.10-4.2.3.5.jar
thaumcraftneiplugin-1.7.10-1.7.jar
thaumicenergistics-0.8.9.0b-rv2.jar
ttCore-MC1.7.10-0.1.0-67.jar
Waila-1.5.9_1.7.10.jar
WailaHarvestability-mc1.7.x-1.1.2.jar
WAILAPlugins-MC1.7.10-0.0.1-13.jar
Wawla-1.1.1_1.7.10.jar

I have a few questions as well:
1. Does anybody have suggestions for config changes (beyond the simple disabling of redundant ores) I could make to improve balance between GregTech and other mods? I'd prefer to hold off on making/downloading MineTweaker scripts for now, but I'm willing to edit the config files for mods
2. I've played ThaumCraft a bit by itself in a separate instance under MultiMC, and I noticed that mining shards from infused stone works with just a wooden pickaxe, yet GregTech allows them to be used to make level 3 or even 4 pickaxes, which seems a little overpowered, given that GregTech ores usually require a matching-level pickaxe, unless they're small ores, which can be mined with the next lower tier. Is this something I should be concerned about, or does it become insignificant later in the game? (e.g by high-tier electric tools from GregTech overshadowing the shard-based pickaxes or by shards becoming more valuable to use for Thaumcraft activities instead)

Edit: I've also re-noticed the "hideSecretRecipes" option in IC2.ini, which I had a couple of questions about:
3. Is there a "legitimate" way a player could discover the hidden recipes? experimenting with the old item-form uu-matter recipes wouldn't have been too bad, since assuming no other items were used in the recipes, that would only be 511 possible arrangements, but for other things, the number of potential recipes becomes overwhelming (e.g. for 300 possible items, 1.9e21 potential recipes)
4. The "First Steps" tutorial (http://wiki.industrial-craft.n…itle=Tutorial:First_Steps) shows the tin bucket recipe and bronze rail recipe, so why are those two still hidden from NEI/Craftguide by default?

Edit #2: scratch question 2 above. I hadn't noticed that the shard-based pickaxes now require thaumium rods.

For my next world, I'm considering using the following mods (and spending some time on configs and Minetweaker scripts before starting the world):

Please let me know your thoughts on this mod list, such as advice on configuration options, suggested additional mods, or if there are conflicts or severe game-balance issues with these mods that I missed, thanks.

Nuclear Control was already in that list (the spoilered list, not the post from February). I don't know if I'll actually make use of its features, but I see no harm in including it.

I was on the fence about IHL until I took another look at the wiki picture under "Gregtech integration" and noticed that it makes it possible to obtain nitrogen from compressed air. I'll go ahead and use the mod.

As far as Thaumcraft, I'm also concerned about the dungeon mounds (which seem unbalanced for peaceful mode, since they're easier to find than normal dungeons and tend to have more treasure iirc) and tainted land, and I don't see a lot of benefit to it, since it seems like for most things that can be done by magic in thaumcraft, there's also a way to do something similar using the tech mods from my list. (in fact, the "getting started" guide for Thaumcraft even describes it as an "alternative to more technology oriented mods", rather than as being complementary to them)

I'm not really familiar with Project E. What can I do with it that I can't emulate with the tech mods that are already in my list?

I'll count that as an argument against using Project E. Mine_Sasha, can you counter that?

I haven't used EE or any of its replacement mods, so I'll take your word for that, unless Mine_Sasha can provide sufficient logic to convince me otherwise.

Also, I decided to spend some time adjusting local copies of scripts from the GitHub repository mentioned on the "Let's Greg Other Mods" thread. I'm not good at coming up with recipe ideas on my own, but I think I've dealt with the following two issues I noticed with them:
1. Some of the recipes involved items from mods I'm not using - I came up with alternative components for some, but for others I just removed the custom recipe.
2. Usages of GregTech tools (e.g. file, hard hammer, screwdriver) were missing "transformDamage", which if I'm not mistaken would make the recipes consume the tools regardless of how much durability they had left. I set those recipes to do 100 durability damage to the tools instead of consuming them.
I have attached a zip of the 9 scripts I changed, in case anyone wants to review them.

The scripts for Carpenter's Blocks, Extra Bees, and Extra Cells didn't seem to have either of those issues, so I plan to use them as they are.

I think there are also some mods in my list without matching scripts in that repository. If someone can provide the ideas for "gregged" recipes for those mods, I think I could write Minetweaker scripts to implement them.

So instead of being overpowered, it becomes redundant?