gonna be a hell of a wait for 1.3.1 mike, mainly since most mods are skipping that to be directly compatible with 1.3.2.
as for technic/tekkit vs vanilla, eh, it's been years since vanilla held much of an interest for me, been there, seen that, a few hundred times over, just really nothing left to do in vanilla for me is all, if not for mods i'd have stopped caring a long time ago and now vanilla just seems to simplistic.
here's whats left of my crafting wall, amazing what a single misclick with a destruction catalyst can do isn't it? both sides of the wall used to be included in the crafting wall for logistics pipe + a glass ceiling over top.
and this would be the innards of my auto smelting/sorting/storage system, there's a chest just out of the shot to the right that acts as the input, the rest are the sorting output, you can also see where i tried and failed to setup a forestry carpenter to auto-crate things for more compact storage.
and here's a hopefully even better look at the breadth of my storage system, you can see i've got storage blocks for most metal included in the crafting pipes logistics system from screenshot number 1, diamonds are like pennies in this world and i haven't been transmuting stuff with equivalent exchange either, i do have a gem of eternal density which compresses your inventory though so a good mining haul is measured in dark matter, i think i bring back about 4 per trip if i try, plus a ton of other metals.
[edit] there's no way to allow the images to collapse then i guess? oh well fuck it, frames be damned, broke ye shall stay [/edit]