hi, i'm a game designer and a long time player and terrorizer of minecraft. i've been around since alpha, i've seen the best and the worst this game has to offer.
to give you a bit of context, i first found out about gregtech back when equivalent exchange was the big mod(lol), and at the time i thought gregtech was genius(the version i first found was 4). combined with IC's wiring system and machinery, gregtech took it to the next level and created more complex machinery that provided a lot of endgame content which was geared towards having creative mode amounts of resources in survival. without dragging it on too long, i'll quickly list the reasons i thought it was good here:
1. it expanded on the idea of maceration in an intuitive way which was relevant to its own machinery. it also directly rewarded the player for doing so, in a way that was time efficient.
2. each new piece of technology felt accomplishing and like the natural progression to the next step. every new piece of machinery you were working towards was built differently, had a very different appearance, fulfilled a unique purpose, and was progressively more complicated to craft. despite each next piece of machinery being used for completely different purposes, it was weaved in a way which still made each machine more useful than the last.
3. building the machinery was never a maze of crafting, and there were always options to cut time on repetitive tasks. this can be attributed to AE2 and other mods compensating for this in certain older modpacks, but we'll get into why gregtech has lost the ability to be user-friendly not by gaming standards, but by limitation of the GUI.
4. it respected the direction IC was heading in trying to reward players for building its machinery, and only then it would offer its additional difficulty to further provide rewards.
5. it provided intuitive targets and goals for players to look forward to right off the bat. the fusion reactor was the ultimate goal: a shiny dream that looked shiny, was ridiculously difficult to accomplish but very easy to assimilate what it was: a massive energy producer. combined with a UU matter machine and other machinery, anybody's imagination could wonder what the possibilities of what they could do were if you had one.
nowadays, i play gregtech on GT New Horizons, which undoubtedly has done the best job integrating the modpack out of anything, and i have to say i am extremely disappointed and left unsatisfied with the direction the mod has taken. all of the machines are mundane and look the same. most are just boring forgettable 1 block structures that are clones of one another but just built with different materials and are completely streamlined. the further you get the more you get punished instead of rewarded, and as you create higher tier machinery you're just paying more for higher efficiency of the same thing that i already have, and there's nothing interesting or attractive about that. the crutch is of course you can't actually process certain things with weaker machines, but that is a very weak and badly designed crutch to compel you to dive further into the machinery tree. this current version of gregtech does not look like it's made by the same person who made the previous version at all. all of the actual interesting and unique structures are completely outshined by these fraudulent tiers, and the balance that was previously created and established was completely thrown out of the window in exchange for excessively complex crafting recipes which can't be designed for any other reason but to waste your time. incorporating all of these tools into recipes was a terrible idea: you have to constantly waste time to remake the tool, you have to constantly waste time putting the tool into the grid, you have to figure out what the hell is going on just to be able to even know how to make the piece that you need... you're expected to have enough inventory space to hold like 6 different tools and all the thousands of different variations of the same materials which the mod now forces you to create(spoilers: you don't), just to go through a maze of pointless crafting when you could have just dumped all of the raw materials in a pot and reached the same outcome without going through all that trouble. unlike the old IC/gregtech where every crafting component had a purpose, now it seems to just be made to be annoying, boring and completely unnecessary. you know there's a problem when you have more than enough materials to do what you're being asked to do but still don't feel like doing it because it feels pointless. that's bad game design no matter how you look at it, and gregtech has gone from being the thing i turned to to run away from the bad game design of minecraft to being the bad game design i was running away from(and for arguably worse reasons!).
if you've gone this far with the mod already, i doubt you're going to change your ways at this point, and if i know anything about minecraft communities it's full of social rejects who are tryhards but with very low intelligence that love to try to bully people like me around. i come here fully expecting you to disagree with me, but i still felt inclined to make this post for 2 reasons. 1, you won't be able to say i didn't try when your mod burns in hell; 2, there's always a very small chance it does make a difference.
in conclusion, it's your mod so do what you want; but just because you want your mod to be a certain thing, doesn't make it right for it to be said thing. that is an extremely selfish way of living, and you definitely have downgraded gregtech from what it was 5 years ago. that being said, do what you want with your life. 
