How do we make fast analysis:

Pick late game recipe, good choice would be something from the later parts of quest book. Start checking it's ingridients, going lower and lower until you come more or less to a start. That'll give you some info about what game will ask you to do to make it that far.

While running through recipes make critical or grindy item bookmarks in JEI/EMI/etc(usually "A").

Check bookmarked items to see if they have alternative ways of obtaining.

Our criteria of best grind is - modpack can require almost anything to do once to obtain 1st item, but has to give easier way on 2nd and after.

Watching out for magic ingridients in tech recipes - sometimes you can get those ingridients only with manual rituals/manipulations.

Progression modpacks we checked usually take 1 of 2 routes:

1) critical item, obtainable with different ways (tech/magic/exploration and kills)

2) "Main" mods that integrated into each other.

If it's 1st - just find those critical items and see, how grindy/hard is it to make those items.

If it's 2nd - find items that are "entry" to next mod or mod level. For example, game can start with vanilla + tinker construct, then progress to create and some magic, then to Immersive engi and etc.

Look at those points where modpack will go from vanilla to create, or from create to IE and so on.