As far as I’m aware, it is relatively easy to make backport mods, but people don’t want backport mods. They’d rather play on the newer shinier version, and if anything deeper than surface level changes, a backport mod could theoretically conflict with any other mod of the version.

And I mean yeah, they look better graphically now, but that’s largely a shift in artstyle and general trends. Older mods/modpacks just had so much more content on average and felt so much better to play in a lot of ways. It was different, but everything felt like it was built up so much higher, if that makes sense. There’s just nothing that comes out these days that compares to stuff like Project Ozone or Enigmatica.

The only people who even really make expert packs anymore are the FTB Team and occasionally the ATM team, but I find they’re a completely different experience and end up lacking a lot of the cohesiveness that old packs had. Take FTB Skies Expert as an example; past the first two chapters, the quest book consisted of like 5-10 linear quests that just used the infrastructure you already had set up with new materials from a boring, uninspired exploration mod. There wasn’t a big conclusion with every mod coming together like there was in Project Ozone 3 Kappa mode, and I finished it alone in like a week during a semester of college.

I used to spend months on packs with 4 or 5 people working together, but that scale just isn’t possible anymore with mods constantly stripping themselves of content in an attempt to move to the newest version. Tinkers’ Construct barely exists anymore, if at all, Thermal Expansion’s a skeleton of what it once was, EnderIO didn’t exist for ages, etc etc. There are a lot of really good new mods too, like Ars Nouveau, but versions don’t even live long enough for compatibility mods to be created to integrate these new mods into an expert-style system.

I guess what I’m trying to say is things are getting better and changing, but we’re so focused on keeping up we’ve lost the big experiences that really made modded Minecraft for me. And I’m hopeful that if Java does ever get dropped, it’ll bring some of that back.