Addon request: crop breeding automation

I'm annoyed by the wide variations in how long it can take for anything to appear in a crossbreeding spot (from a few seconds to 20 minutes or more from what I've seen), so I would like to have an addon that makes it possible to at least partially automate crop breeding, in terms of one or more of the following steps:
1. Collecting seedbags from fully-grown crops and re-applying cropsticks to make certain positions crossbreeding plots again (with a supply of cropsticks placed in a machine's inventory), while leaving other positions alone to act as "parent" crops.
2. Filtering seeds based on type and growth/gain/resistance stats, or even choosing a range of those to allow to grow in the crossbreeding plots (crops that don't meet the criteria would be kicked out and replaced with fresh cropsticks to make the spot a crossbreeding plot again).
3. Pulling weeds (with a weeding trowel placed in a machine's inventory). I know the crop-matron can apply weed-ex, but apparently that risks damaging crop stats - I thought I'd read somewhere that using weed-ex via the crop-matron used to be safe (because the crop-matron was smart enough to avoid over-usage), so I wonder when that changed.

I thought about trying to make such an addon myself, but 1. I haven't made any Minecraft mods before, and 2. I have some health issues at the moment that make it hard to concentrate on Java programming.

I'm also curious whether other IC2 users would be interested in such a mod, and if not, why.

I looked at a spotlight for the AgriCraft mod, and I like how it's configurable and more open about the mutations (as opposed to here, where Alblaka put up that hulking large rule about not revealing source information, which might explain why many, including the AgriCraft author in the description for that mod, claim that IC2 crop breeding is completely random), being able to disable weeds is tempting, and I like how it allows spreading a crop with cross-crops adjacent to a single crop. However, it didn't look like it was significantly faster at populating the cross-crops - the spotlight video used jump cuts for that. Also, a few things I don't like about AgriCraft after watching that video:
1. Crop stats are capped at 10.
2. Crop stats apparently never decrease when spreading or mutating crops, which seems overpowered even to me.
3. There was no mention of drawbacks to having certain stats too high (like how IC2 crops with high growth behave like weeds, and crops with high resistance are harder to breed)

I'm in single-player peaceful with GT5e and PFAA (and default worldgen, not skyblock or anything), so ferru doesn't interest me much, nor do most of the other metal-producing crops: they require ores or metal blocks below them and only produce tiny dusts (or items that have to be put in an extractor to get the tiny dusts), so mining for ores will still be more attractive for quite a while. I'm more interested in crops like blazereed, diareed, slimeplant, oilberries, and redwheat.

Being able to put IC2 seeds in a Gendustry (Advanced) Mutatron or equivalent machine would be cool (and I had actually thought of that before, even if I hadn't mentioned it). I don't think that would be overpowered, considering the energy and mutagen cost, and further balancing could be done by decreasing the chance of successful mutation.

I like Speiger's idea too: if I could apply some sort of fertilizer to the cross-crops and get an immediate result, even if that had a higher chance of producing weeds and required me to completely break and replace the cropsticks to be able to try again, that would make crop-farming significantly less frustrating.

What do you mean, Speiger? I thought the video (or maybe it was the mod description) said that crossing AgriCraft crops had something like an 80% chance (by default, since it's configurable) of just resulting in one of the parent crops.

Also, how do you come up with your number of 2 trillion? The stats for IC2 crops (growth, gain, resistance) each range from 0 to 31, so with three of them that's 32768 possible combinations of stats. With IC2exp build 811 and GT 5.09.19, there are now 74 different crop types (not counting weeds), thus I only come up with a total of around 2.4 million distinguishable seed bags. I expect the number of possible results from a specific crossbreeding attempt to be significantly smaller, even when using wildly disparate crops.

That certainly sounds like a good reason to skip AgriCraft, but let's look at this from another perspective: are there any IC2 or GT crops that are really worth the time and effort of breeding them in a single-player peaceful world, instead of getting similar materials from other sources, such as mining, the Peaceful Plus mod, the peaceful table from Extra Utilities, GT Bees/Gendustry custom bees, etc.?

Sorry, but I don't feel the same way about those particular crops:

I'm not particularly interested in making beer or coffee. (or tea, for that matter)

Stickreed was attractive for a while (since it avoided the need for making treetaps and looking up and down and around trees to find the resin holes), but now I'm thinking a Forestry Rubber Plantation (using rubber trees) is better.

Redwheat is unimpressive when a GT redstone ore vein can easily contain several hundred (or maybe even a few thousand) redstone ore blocks, which each macerate to 10 crushed redstone ore.

Quote from Speiger

As i said: for logic gates and not for the loot... I mean who has a logic gate powered by crops xDDD

iirc, fully grown redwheat emits a redstone signal, so theoretically, it could be done. XD

Quote from Speiger

I mean why ever use the direct purpose? Why not looking at a indirect purpose? My example for the Logic Circuits.
You could combine wheat and cooa Crops to run generators and alll that stuff (food generator from extra utils)
And gaining some dyes from crops can be usefull too...

I forgot about the Food Generator from Extra Utils, since I don't have that mod installed at the moment (though now that the bug with anvil sound effects upon opening the inventory with GT installed has apparently finally been fixed, I'm willing to consider it). Dyes, huh? Let's see, besides decorative uses, they can keep cables from connecting by virtue of being different colors, right? Any other uses I might not be aware of?

Quote from Speiger

Also a thing that Agricraft can not have (by its own) is the crazy grwoth speed for crops. I have with 9,9,9-12,12,12 Crops about every 3-5 Minutes (based on growth calc) almsot a stack woth of Wheat which is (in classic) the same amount of food... While Agricraft is limited to random blockupdates... xD (that excludes random blockupdate helpers like Watering can or bonemeal of any kind)

While we're at it, AgriCraft drop rate is limited to what, 4 items for a 10/10/10 "super" crop, right? I think I've seen as many as 8 pumpkins drop from a single high-stat IC2 crop.

Quote from Speiger

Well with the next classic update you need maybe a hour with this special Fertilzer.

Any chance you could release the special fertilizer in a mini-mod for IC2exp (sort of like you did with the crop breeding calculator), or does it involve deep changes to the crop system that make it only practical to do in IC2 classic?