Well-made but lacks a feeling of progression and recipes are sometimes unnecessarily grindy

I played Vault Hunters with a friend, and while all the special made content (vaults, skills and so on) feels well-made and high quality, we ultimately stopped playing. This was do to a feeling of even though you spent some 40-50 hours in a world, you don't feel like you made any major progress. You rarely get a feeling of: "wow, this is a milestone". Of course you level up but except from the first few level, that doesn't feel very exciting.

Another problem with the pack is the recipes.
I usually play more classic expert modpacks, like DJ2 and E2E (which i have completed) and some gregtech modpacks, so I'm used to having difficult recipes but as you progress, you usually get the means to makes does recipes less demanding. In Vault Hunters, many modded recipes require gems found in the vault which in the beginning are pretty demanding. But the thing is, the recipes don't really get easier.
Before you even get access to a mod, you have to unlock it, which takes a good amount of grind but you this is actually one of the few parts of the mod I felt gave a sense of: "you have progressed". A mod like storage drawers takes quite a grind but when you finally unlock it you're happy, but then you see the a single compacting drawer takes the same amount of grind as a netherite chestplate in vanilla. Of cause a compacting drawer shouldn't be easy, but the cost of the recipe doesn't go down as it require alot of vault gems.
Vault gems are only found in randomly spawned rooms in the vault. Of cause you get fortune and so on, but the amount of gems you get increases very slowly. Way slower then the demand increases, which in the end means you got to run more vaults. Of cause that's the point of the pack, but having to grind for six hours for single drawer isn't fun, especially as the cost of the vault increases. This leads to you having to go out and grind for resources, sometimes for pretty long time when you need a chest worth of beetroot seeds and cocoa beans, which you don't have the means to automate, as that would require vault gems.