The lack of early game storage solutions makes it unbearable

The big kahuna itself. Honestly, I just can't get past it. I tried it a long time ago and made it to steam and then quit immediately. Then I tried it again and made it to MV and then quit again. Honestly my biggest gripe with it is the inventory management. I'm normally alright with some grind: I put serious hours into RLCraft and Pyanodons, and the grind here wouldn't be so bad if I had the means to actually automate it, but to automate it without AE2 requires such a ridiculous amount of materials (mostly steel) that I spent multiple days trying to automate just LV circuits (look, I got to 300 hours in a Pyanodons save in Factorio, beat bobs+angels, and beat other modpacks as well. I'm alright with grindy automation normally) and that wasn't from not understanding how the automation works, it was just from the sheer resource gathering and crafting for all the assemblers, pipes, covers, and other various machines. It just wasn't fun, and I don't see myself sticking around until I finally can get to AE2. Hell, I'd settle for just having autocrafting gated off, just... give me a bigger inventory. Diamond chests weren't enough: I had like 12 of them filled up before I quit, not to mention the 10s of drawers also fulls of materials I couldn't even use.

The depth is insane, the optimization is insane. The sheer breadth of content is awe-inspiring. But ******* if there isn't a 10 mile high wall between me and it. Just give me AE2 for the love of god.

I'm not dropping it yet, I imagine I'll come back to it and continue ramming my head against my automation projects, but for now, I'm going to try some modpacks I know are actually completable within a year, and won't take me 300 more hours to unlock the one mod that would make it bearable to play.