You guys forgot only ONE thing when you deccided to change from the old and loved EU to the new and shiny looking RF:
The only thing that was saving your mod from dying were the professional and experienced players since the beginnings and why;
Because the new players who got tired only by looking at the recipes of some basic things, instantly went to the more noob friendly TE and EnderIO.
So the users of this mod are hardcore modders and that is the main reason why gregtech become so know; because it challenged the most professional players as well as scared away the newcommers and "fainthearted".
And the main reason why this mod WAS hard... because EU!
The shiny looking RF is more noob friendly than the old and dusty EU because you don't need to worry for voltage and explosons because connecting a Nuklear Reactor to your hardly carfted MFE and
it explodes then you lose all your hardly generated EU and a quite expensive MFE... this is the point were the noobs give up (if they havent given up before) and the hardcore old chapms say a "#@$ß&#÷$#&ß@" and recreate all things they have lost.
You said the reason is incompatibility with Fastcraft but everybody knows that is just the top of the iceberg... you saw all the RF API based mods' success and your mod's fall and you said something like this: "We'll try switching to RF beause we have already fallen and nothing can make us THE INDUSTRIAL CRAFT 2 we WERE ONCE in the history of MC modding... :(".
And back to FastCraft with this switch you rewrote all the code for RF capatibility so you could have remade the EU with the same charcteristics but with a new code behind it for the compatibility with FastCraft.
You wanted to become more user and noob friendly but there is only one problem with this: the noobs need to know what IC is and they need to know they can now use it - this is the part that this whole idea is missing: the noobs won't change from TE because they know that mod and they are too scared to change from what they know and what they see*...
(* = they don't even see it even youtubers like DireWolf20 don't use this mod since TE)
And if you cut the last rope (haha) that the mod is on: the power of the old masters...
If you recreate our mod to be more noob friendly and your mod's audience were old players who used and loved IC since the original release of IC1 there is a high risk that your mod will collapse...
And i am affraid to say if we can't reverse this (and i don't think we can) IC2 will disappear as all the other Old Mods like EE2 and Red Power or get it to a position like BC (allmost every modpack has it, but nobody uses it)...
This might not happen instantly and the older downloads might keep this mod like half-dead but slowly it will die because there won't be enough noob to fill the job of us the current users of IC
the will be new tech mods for hardcore usage
As somebody said our only hopes are Reika, and GregoriusT to save the mod by standing whit the failing IC and get it to the save zone once again by rerincrementing EU and doing they were doing all the time...
P.S:
Reika and Greg save IC before it's too late!!!!!!! 
P.P.S:
I know the buildcraft pipe explosion and cable limit stuff and it would be perfect to ballance this mistake but as i wrote: nobody uses BC! TD and EnderIO have limitless cables and conduits