Its 2025. Is a balanced semi-gated pack with quests a pipe dream?

Let me preface this by saying I know there are limits as to how certain mods can be configured, and that we can't always expect a AAA level of quality from a handful of devs. My problem stems from mods being added to packs essentially untweaked.

I love making servers for packs to play with my 5-7 buds about once or twice every year, but I absolutely dread it because its usually me that ends up playing hand of god behind the scenes trying to edit all of the server scripts and mod configs as we play so that its actually fun to use everything in the pack to its fullest extent. By the end of it all it really feels like these devs haven't even done a full playthrough of their own modpack with how egregious some of these mods are out of the box.

A few examples off the top of my head:

-Tools, mainly weapons, that have modifications that completely trivialize the entire rest of the options in the pack.

-Bosses that you work the entire pack towards encountering only for them to fall over to a handful of attacks. (Vanilla has this problem but the thing with modded is that the ender dragon is usually the beginning for most packs, not the end.)

-Mods that take the entirety of Mine out of Minecraft. (Looking at you Mekanism, Draconic Evolution, and Mystical Agriculture/Croparia/Resourceful Bees etc.)

So far, the only modpack to actually come close to properly balancing things in a way that makes logical sense is SevTech, but that pack has its own problems. The way items are hidden and revealed feels super ham-fisted, and I believe you can strike a balance with much less work. Darkosto put many MANY hours into that pack, and it shows. I enjoyed that pack a lot.

I think the most recent pack we have played that has gotten closest to having a mix of mods and a balanced playstyle with end game goals, was Chocolate Edition. But even that took heavy tweaking because I think its still in development.

"Nobody is forcing you to use the items/mods that are broken"

Fair enough, but its exhausting enough actively having to dodge untweaked items, especially since its a different ball game when its multiplayer. A lot of these mods are tightly integrated with the quest system and you can't simply just drag and drop it out of the modpack. Which is even more strange that devs would go through all the effort of making an intricate quest tree only to have a mod completely trivialize their entire progression structure.