Autowork

Let's be unconventional and start with the bottom line: I enjoy Autowork a lot!

It is the only automation mod that I am aware of that really leans into the redstone-like toolbox philosophy where it gives you a bunch of relatively generic universal tools and allows you to do your own problem solving with those.
It's what people commonly describe as the opposite of the "magic block" design pattern: instead of providing you with a block that pre-solves your task (e. g. the IE Garden Cloche for an automatic tree farm) if you pump enough resources/energy into it, it provides you with a bunch of cheap, generic tools that you can arrange cleverly to solve your specific task yourself.

It's something that Create originally set out to do and is often praised for, but ultimately ends up failing due to the addition of tons of blocks and items with a really specific purpose. Shafts and cogs are just cables, water wheels are just generator blocks, and the processing blocks are magic 'ore crusher' type machines, right?

Autowork instead takes cues from vanilla automation, and simply expands it.
If you are the kind of person who complains about 'magic block' tech mods, but does not like Create because you feel it's also ultimately a 'magic block' mod with pretty animations, this might be right up your alley. It also performs much better, so no more laggy factories!

The Autowork aesthetics are excellent and fit in perfectly with the vanilla game. Most of the blocks are inspired by the Crafter and similar existing redstone machines, and they are all very well animated and themed. These look exactly like what Mojang would do. The author is nice, active, takes both suggestions and criticism very well, and updates the mod quite frequently.

So, why the slightly lowered review score?
Well, my problem with Autowork is that some of the utilities it adds are already easily possible using vanilla redstone. The most obvious offenders here are the pulsating timer, the AND gate, and the chute. (I am not going to count things like the Minecart loader/unloader here because while they're technically possible in vanilla with things like amethyst crystals, they involve quite in-depth glitches and unexpected physics behaviour that just aren't too clean to use.)

This might not sound like a big deal, but if the whole idea is to expand creativity-driven redstone-style automation without 'magic blocks', it does not make much sense to replace existing redstone circuits and mechanics with single-block versions. Additionally, some of the blocks already slowly being 'magic block'-ified with some more recent updates, with auto-filters and such included despite filtering already being a fun problem to solve using vanilla redstone.

These minor nitpicks however are just that – minor nitpicks – and do not impact my enjoyment of the mod much. I definitely still recommend Autowork for anyone who likes Redstone-style automation and simply wants a better way to break and place blocks, use minecarts in automation, push entities around without water and all those kinds of shenanigans.

(Transparency disclaimer: I volunteered to provide localisation to Autowork so technically I contributed to it; however, I had no creative input and I am not related or associated with the mod's developer otherwise)