I've never played a previous version of Slightly Flavoured (or as it was known, Slightly Vanilla Flavoured), but what I have played is an official variation of the modpack called Slightly Cinnamon Flavoured. Slightly Cinnamon Flavoured took the base of Slightly Vanilla Flavoured and added a few minor tech mods like Immersive Engineering and Botania. Didn't actually engage with anything SCF specifically added other than Botania all that much, but I liked the pack well enough. It was one of the earlier packs to go in on Tetra, providing a decent enough Tetra experience as well as unique features like seasons and a wall jumping mod that occassionally came in clutch. It was a very light pack, coming in at only 130 mods, and was a bit lacking in QOL because of that, but it was fine enough.

Fast forward to now where I was excited to see how the latest standard version of the main pack would fare. Unfortunately, the things that I thought were good about SCF are not present and everything bad about the pack design remains in addition to brand new problems that I would've never envisioned.

The pack is massive now, coming in at over 300 mods, and it weighs like that too; even on a low render distance with Distant Horizons removed and Java 25 CompactObjectHeaders this pack wants at least 5GB of alloc. It performs excellently, though its not entirely stable; I ate a LegacyRandomSource crash like five minutes in.

Even if the performance hasn't suffered for it, this obscene mod dump causes a lot of other issues especially considering it's a largely unconfigured pack. One example is mods with entirely conflicting goals; there's a mod that adds random RPG modifiers to crafted armor and tools, but it seems to only do it for vanilla armor and tools, and if you turn your tool into a Tetra tool the modifier will go away. It also likes to expose untranslated strings for its modifiers. I don't think this adds to the modpack, and I don't know why it's here if it messes with some of the core appeals of the modpack, being the wide variety of modded armors and Tetra tools you're likely to want to pal around with.

We are also running into overlapping mods. We have multiple tetra addons adding multiple variations of the same material, two mods that add Silver where the Galosphere recipes aren't unified and won't take Caverns and Chasms silver. Quark and Every Compat means if you try to use a log on a Mechanical Saw it's going to block cut and you're going to get a hollow log instead if you don't have a filter, while many other wood related recipes are not compatible with Create block cutting.

The mod selection itself gets a little funky; for example, AE2 seems to have migrated from SCF into the main pack for nebulous reasons considering the lack of most anything you'd need AE2 specifically for. There are a lot of single purpose mods I'd probably never be able to track down unless I meticulously scrolled through the very stuffed advancements. There's a mod here to make you take damage when you punch fire which is not appreciated. For some reason every time I get an advancement the modpack takes a screenshot in the background which I didn't really ask for?

This is not an exhaustive list of nitpicks, and nitpicks they are, but beyond the nitpicks, I just don't really see the results of this massive modlist? It doesn't feel noticeably richer than a pack like SCF was; we have two dimension mods which are both pretty old (Aether and Twilight Forest), the Nether is pretty much just BOP nether with some structures, and the most prominent addition is a new combat focused magic mod which takes a while to get going. We are still massively lacking in certain QOL mods like Appleskin, Fast Leaf Decay, or something like Carry On. It is a shockingly meager showing for a modpack which, again, has over 300 mods in it and the RAM consumption to compensate.

It is at the bare minimum a functional modpack; it hasn't crashed since that initial crash so I'm going to say that was a fluke, and it runs really really smoothly in spite of its resource consumption, but the rest of the actual content in the pack is a really disappointing devolution when I know I've seen better from this pack dev.