Chipping in with my two cents, I've always preferred to have things as vanilla as possible. Stuff like TreeAssist and MobCatcher helped reduce monotony, but didn't fundamentally alter the nature or resource gathering. I can't help but feel that if we had industrial-style mods we'd all soon be swimming in resources, and essentially playing creative mode sans flying. Whilst we had a lot of assistance in the previous server, at the end of the day if you wanted to build something big you'd have to put in some effort beforehand, and I quite liked that.