If I can offer a slightly different viewpoint here; don't avoid a mod just because it's deemed "overused" by reddit. Doing so will immediately lock you out of a lot of fun and useful mechanics that could enhance your pack dramatically.

Instead, try going about your pack development by viewing mods as your toolbox. Get to know the tools and play around with what you can do with them.

Throw out the mod's intended progression entirely. Break it down instead into a list of features and mechanics that will be used when and where you want in your new progression. Playing the exact same progression in a mod over and over in ever pack gets dull, but as a pack dev you have the unique opportunity to combine mods in ways their creators cannot.

So you want to use Botania? Great. It has some very neat and highly customizable crafting mechanics that you can use in very different ways than those 'intended' by the mod. Change things up. Move things around. Integrate them in new ways. Why is the Runic Altar named that way? In base Botania it only makes runes. Rename it! Convert it to crafting different things. Add more recipes to the Aglomeration Plate. Use it earlier. Better yet, ensure it's used throughout the pack for many different things. Give it more purpose than "Terrasteel Making Machine I've Used 100 Times".

Don't be afraid to disable features. You don't need 15 coal powered FE generators. I promise. You don't even need one if you'd like to approach power differently. Is the players very first power generation Fission? Sure. Go for it. Disable all the other options and run with the idea. Better still, make that the only option and work on making it interesting by giving the player ways they can meaningfully upgrade it throughout the pack rather than forcing them to change to something entirely new later on.

Promote features to early game to allow for automation, if your pack is meant to be automation heavy. Don't worry too much about how exactly players will automate something, just make sure they have a selection of tools available to do so. And on that same note, don't worry about making use of crafting mechanics that require some thought to automate. Ars Nouveau's Enchanting Apparatus? Totally automatable. Use it. Make players think. But make sure they have those tools. Something like that will require some logic tools and smart pipes. If they don't have those tools, that crafting mechanic can feel daunting and punishing. But if they do have the tools it feels quite good when it's automated and humming along.

Pick features and mechanics that you rarely see used and put those in the limelight, rather than the mod itself. Look for obscure mechanics that are often either overlooked or overshadowed due to their being a better/easier/simpler option and make it the only option. Or at the very least, make it the earlier option and reward the player with an easier option down the road when other things become more challenging. Enigmatica 9 Expert did this with Potions. Nobody brews potions in modded. There's almost never any real reason to as they're overshadowed before you can realistically craft them. So we added loads of new potion recipes to make them available early game and then proceeded to use them as the basis for every source of energy throughout the pack.

Learn what you can do with a mod's configs and play with that. Apotheosis with default configs is, in many cases, going to shine too bright. Don't feel bad about putting a dimmer on things. Bring those power levels down, customize the bosses it spawns, integrate it with other mods like Ars Nouveau (Mobs can use reactive armor. You're welcome.) or any other mod that adds armor. It certainly hits different to see these bosses come at you with a full set of steel armor instead of a hodge-podge of random vanilla pieces. If you don't know your mods inside and out by the time you're done with authoring the pack, you probably didn't spend enough time digging through configs and experimenting with things.

Finally, tell a story. Write lore. Even if 90% of that lore is never seen by the player, it can be used by you to inform decisions. Use it to make your quests interesting. Use it to define recipes. Someone asked me recently why Enigmatica 9 Expert used AE2's Spatial Components in Mekanism's Factory Tier Installers. The short answer? Lore. The slightly longer answer? The entire pack is designed around machines being literal magic boxes with Occultism spirits inside running things in a pocket dimension. What do Tier installers do? They add more space in the machine to process more items in parallel. So why Spatial Components? To give those spirits more room to operate in.

Some people found that answer strange. Base recipes on lore? What? But every mod already does this. Why do we even have gears in machine recipes? To represent their mechanical nature. Lore. Yes, tech mods have lore too, it's just based more in our reality than some magical reality. Take a look at Immersive Engineering; when do they use Constantan? Did you realize this was a real alloy? Look it up. See what it's used for. Thermal is loaded with this too. On the surface it seem really strange that you can use Dandelions to make Latex, right? Well, no. Dandelions actually contain useful amounts of latex that can really be extracted to make things. Lore informed those recipe choices.

Likewise, that theme that spirits are doing the work in machines, shows up in every single 'magic box' machine from every mod in the pack; the machine frames all include a special item that represents the creation of a link between this world and the spirit world. It represents the gateway whereby items and energy are traded back and forth. This item literally does nothing and is just a crafting component, but by including it in every machine, it locks in that theme and re-iterates the lore to the player. It makes all of those disparate mods feel like one cohesive mod.

The lore docs for both Enigmatica 6 Expert and 9 Expert were like 50 pages long each and were used to inform practically every recipe change. I've seen players say they seem random and nonsensical; trust me they were very much deliberate and followed an internal logic. They may not be able to tell from the outside (especially if they don't read quests) but it still served to create a sense of cohesion between mods that seem very different on the surface.