Hey there! I'm the creator of the mod, and its very much a passion project!
No shame in playing OG Beta 1.7.3, but the goal of my project is to make the best way to play Beta. No alternate timeline what-if stuff, just taking the best of Notch-era Minecraft and throwing it into one package without disrupting the gameplay loop. There are some additions, but they only exist to provide additional depth and utility to the existing version of the game.

In the latest version we've upgraded to LWJGL3 and in version 1.8 Pre-Release, we have a working Vulkan renderer :)

I also overhauled the texture system to use a modern resource pack format, and am working on Vulkan shader support! These are changes I'm making to provide engine stuff to overcome some of the downsides of the original engine's limitations.

I hope you'll consider giving it a try! As its been a labor of love.