GregTech single-player and using other mods with it

At the moment, I'm using just GregTech 5, IC2 (since it's still required for GregTech), and AE2, plus utility mods like NEI and Waila, in single-player peaceful, and I'm somewhat daunted at the moment looking at the recipe for the "basic" steam turbine (I've been playing this world for about a week, I've set up 4 small coal boilers powering 5 bronze steam machines, and I've got a bronze plated blast furnace and a high-pressure coal boiler that I'll be using to supply steam to the turbine). Now I'm wondering about how other people deal with this, so my questions are:
1. Does anybody else play GregTech in single-player?
2. How many mods (not counting utility mods) do other people use alongside GregTech?
3. Is it more common to configure other mods to try to balance with GregTech (beyond just disabling oregen), or to use them to soften some of GregTech's difficulty? (e.g. using Railcraft tanks (or maybe Extra Utilities drums) to store steam, using Buildcraft pumps and pipes to supply the water to the boilers, or even using a Tinkers' Construct Smeltery for the early metals like iron, copper, tin, and bronze - I wouldn't expect the smeltery to handle all of the GregTech metals, even after compensating for the Aluminum/Aluminium spelling discrepancy mentioned on the FTB GregTech mod compatibility page)

Note: I realize this thread might fit better in the GregTech subforum, but I don't get a "new thread" button there (not sure why, or even why the GregTech subforum is still under "addons" when it has become more of an overhaul than an addon). I didn't want to ask these questions in the main GregTech thread, because then replies to my post would likely get buried by other posts in that thread.

I've been hesitant to use a modpack. Presumably the benefit is that it comes pre-configured for balance and inter-mod conflict resolution, but I see a drawback: having as many mods as the two you mentioned would prevent me from using the high-resolution texture packs that I like. Are there any small modpacks (say, about 20 or fewer mods, not counting utility mods) that include GregTech? If there are, I might be willing to try one of them.

Quote from SpwnX

Then, try copying the custom modpack the kirara server has. It has a bit more than 20 but not a hundred like the usual modpacks.

That mod list might actually work for me (fwiw, based on this definition it doesn't qualify as a "modpack") - I'll probably have to use 64x textures, but that's not as bad as having to look at default 16x textures on a 28-inch 4k monitor.
However, I have a couple of concerns:
1. According to the second post of the Kirara 2.0 thread, the server is set to Hard difficulty. Would any of the config settings or mods be inappropriate to use in peaceful difficulty?
2. Are there any mods from that list I should skip when setting it up for single-player? (I already noticed that Morpheus would be pointless for single-player, but I haven't found anything to tell me ahead of time whether the linked FastLeafDecay mod will work for single-player, and there might be others to question)

I tried downloading the configs and Minetweaker scripts from the Kirara 2.0 thread, and the mods listed, except for Morpheus and qCraft, though I used newer versions of most of them and added Optifine, and I don't think it's really for me.
1. I didn't find Sphax texturepacks for "IHL Tools & Machines" or "Underground Biomes Constructs"
2. I came across several blocks early on that still had 16x textures (e.g. cassiterite sand, garnet sand (for which the popup display of the name, which I hadn't realized was possible without Waila, rapidly fluctuates between that and some number of nuggets), and granitic mineral sand)
3. Some of the options seem to be taking the difficulty a little too far for me, such as "hiddenores" (I'm not familiar with the PFAA stone types, and now I can't even see which ones have ores in them?), disabling the wood to charcoal furnace recipe (I think it's still possible to make charcoal in a Railcraft coke oven, but I had to install NEI Integration, which isn't listed for Kirara 2.0, to see that), and limiting stack sizes to 16.

If I do those things, I'm not really copying the Kirara mod list, am I? btw, I can confirm that Fast Leaf Decay works in single player, and i forgot to mention I also skipped eirairc and AppleCore. Another thing I noticed was that the "thickness" of a flint pickaxe in my hand was mostly transparent. I could probably track down the option for that, but simpler to switch back to my GregTech+AE2 instance and add a few mods (BuildCraft, Forestry, and Railcraft, though with their worldgen options disabled). That also allows me to use 128x textures instead of 64x.

New semi-related question: when preparing redstone dust for smelting into red alloy for circuits, is it more common to put the impure dust in a centrifuge and do something else while it's running, or to continue to use a cauldron even after one has built electric machines? Or is there some other way to process it that I hadn't found?

Even when the machine takes 34 seconds per item?

Or maybe it's 17 seconds because 5 EU/t would probably qualify as ULV for the recipe - I'll have to time it when I get back to my base.

Either way, I'm pretty sure it's a lot slower than doing it manually with a cauldron (unless the cauldron is far from the water).

I hadn't really left room for hoppers or pipes to handle automation. Is it common to set up separate sets of machines for different materials?

I changed my mind about the high-res textures, so I'll look further into Infitech 2 and Beyond Reality later, but perhaps some of you who've played them could save me some time by summarizing the differences and the pros and cons of each (I already tried Google, and it didn't bring up a simple side-by-side comparison of the two mods). I'm also curious how you feel about FTB Resurrection, and if you know of a GregTech modpack that's specifically designed for peaceful mode.

Edit: I tried to endure the default 16x textures starting around when I'd made this post, but I only made it about a week. Exploring and mining wasn't too bad with them, but last night when I moved my crops from a layer-67 plains farm I'd made without checking the material below to a layer-130 farm I built above swampland with a full 3 layers of dirt placed below, I finally decided to switch back to the BDCraft textures.

Now I've gotten to HV tier and have built an IC2 mining laser (though I haven't built HV machines beyond what I needed for that yet), I don't mind the redstone centrifuging so much or wading through NEI to try to find the fastest or most material-efficient way to craft different items, but I've come across some oddities I'd like to mention:

GregTech internal logic issues (maybe somebody can explain these, but at the moment, I don't see the logic behind these details):
1. It takes 10 times as much time and EU to smelt steel dust in an EBF compared to smelting wrought iron to get steel (setting aside the time it takes to prepare the wrought iron and oxygen)
2. It takes almost twice as long and more than twice as much EU to smelt one pile of aluminium dust in an EBF than to smelt three [green] sapphires or three rubies (which will provide enough nuggets for one ingot).
3. With my current set of mods, I can use an MV-tier fluid extractor to get liquid aluminium from 101 different items, and liquid steel from 239 different items, including ingots and plates, but not from the simple dusts (unless I turn off the blast furnace requirements in the config, which also allows me to smelt the dusts in a simple furnace as well, which I'm not certain is appropriate).

Wiki issue:
On the FTB Wiki GregTech 5 Mining and Processing page, near the bottom, it says:

Quote

Hammer, Forge Hammer: The simpler form of the Macerator, it smashes ores but does not double them. It's fast, but it's effectively useless after you have electric machines.

I have to disagree. Even after making plenty of other electric machines, the forge hammer is still useful for the following:
1. Converting crushed ores to impure dusts (faster and lower EU cost than re-macerating the crushed ores)
2. Converting purified ores to purified dusts
3. Getting gems from gem ores (faster and lower EU cost than smelting the ore block, though I think it produces fewer gems per ore block than processing ore blocks to dusts and then autoclaving or implosion-compressing the dusts)

Inter-mod oddities (I presume some of these can be fixed via MineTweaker and/or ModTweaker, but it might be good if someone could edit the FTB wiki page on GregTech mod compatibility to mention them; I hesitate to do so myself):
1. In surface craters from AE2 meteorites, I sometimes find blocks that show as "gt.blockores.0.name" in Waila, and when I mine one, it drops vanilla iron ore. I've had vanilla ore generation disabled in the gregtech configs since the world was created.
2. Many Railcraft devices are apparently not craftable by default when GregTech 5 is installed: the steam oven, the engraving bench, the rock crusher, the feed station, steel tank valves/gauges (though strangely steel tank walls are still craftable), the boiler fireboxes, the void chest, and the metals chest.
3. Buildcraft and Forestry have their own recipes for a few types of gears, which in the early game are cheaper to craft than the GregTech equivalents, and no options in their configs for disabling those recipes.