Don't mind me, just dropping by to proclaim my love for Redpower world. Or more specific, Halfblocks.
Halfblocks are great. 200+ recipes to make them, isn't good at all. I'd rather have a machine or two. Chopsaw block?
Or just handling blocks and recipes better. Rather than having each block and tool having unique IDs which must be specifically referenced by specific recipes, have a parent block/tool that allows a myriad of attributes, and then all recipes either use all blocks/tools of that parent, or parents with specific attributes. For example, rubberwood might have a parent type of wood, allowing it to be used in all the ways a wood block might be used (but different results based on rubberwood's attributes, e.g. fewer planks, fewer smelt operations, or being refined into rubber when a mod's machinery looks at what it can do with it based on the attributes). Likewise, the cutting recipes especially would use any kind of tool of parent type hacksaw (provided it meets certain attributes, e.g. 'cuts as diamond or better'), using any kind of block, and the results are determined dynamically based on inputs rather than because the recipe has a specific output based on specific input.
But I'm not much of programmer. One could probably hack that kind of thing into Minecraft one's self, if you had the time and the care to (which is quite a lot, I realize) and the expertise, since modding changes the base code itself rather than being limited to whatever development tools a game provides, but who knows if it'll actually work out like I expect or if it is even as simple as it sounds. It's very likely there are obvious problems I don't see.