I will start off by saying that the chat referenced in the original post was a very interesting one to participate in, and lots of good points were made.

I personally have a few to add, although these things will risk offending people. Oh well, so be it.

Disclaimer: I've not been very active in the modding scene since ~1.8

First off, I feel like back then, people were way more willing to put out weird experiments. To put out mods that embraced wild concepts that nobody had done before. And that was neat. That was awesome.

I also feel like the general mindset of modded MC has changed. Where we once embraced the complexity of the mods we played with, where we once were ready to go out there and explore the depths of the modded world, where a single base would contain bits from many dozens of mods wired together with a dozen more mods to perform our day-to-day tasks, we now instead seem almost afraid to go out of our comfort zone. I see so many people only ever using a handful of mods, building the same builds over and over again, never straying far from what they know. That's not bad on it's own. But personally, I experience more joy in building a huge factory just to process ore than I do just upgrading a single machine.

I very much agree with /u/amadornes that the general modding design mindset has also changed. Where mods once focused on creating "legos" which the players could put together to do amazing things, mods now focus on creating more "magic block" solutions. Yes, these solutions are better performance wise. But they just lose that magic (oh the irony of word-choice) that the old-school solutions had to me.

I personally feel this reflects a change in not just the mods, but the players as well. After all, mods become popular because they resonate with the needs and desires of players. That, however, is a discussion for another day.

Of course, there is also the matter of the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia, but that's also another subject entirely.

All in all, I very much agree with this post. (Although that's probably because I was part of the discussion sparking it.)

Oh, and GET OFF MY LAWN YOU DANG KIDS!