I am back to modded Minecraft.
The Modded Minecraft world seems somewhat bleak at the moment becaus emany content creators for Java Minecraft are, so I am told, working hard on 1.17 mods. Minecraft 1.17 will be one of the more content heavy updates in a long time, certainly since 1.15, and will greatly expand the vanilla experience and it has drawn most of the modding tallent (again, so I have been told) to preparing for that launch.
That being said, there was a lot to like about Minecraft 1.16. A greatly improved Nether, countered maybe by a rather annoying End... and opening up a lot of core game rules to adjusting per-world to suit a gamers need. I think the one basic setting I can't do without is pretty cheaty, it is the "Keep Items on Death" setting that.. well, does what it says on the tin. I'm been playing Minecraft long enough that I have earned the leisure of not losing everything because I accidentally fell in the lava.
Also, the "Keep" setting fits more with the genre of mod packs I like playing.. namely Action RPG looter style modpacks.
My current go to is Craft to Exile [Harmony], which is a reworking, and more up to date, take on Craft to Exile [Dissonance]. Harmony plays more like Vanilla Minecraft, or a standard modpack, that doesn';t change the basic goals of Minecraft, but gives a lot more to do. Dissonance is far more story driven.. which tends to be where most mod packs fall apart for me. Most modders are not very skilled writers and it shows.
Harmony just adds dungeons and a cool PoE style skill system and gear. My only knock on the gear system so far, and it's a big one, is that the gear is not normalized to the level of the dungeon, it's completely random, so you will ge a lot of gear drops you just can't use because they are too high a level. But so long as you stick to your own crafted gear at the start, you stay competitive with the dungeons.
So far it's pretty fun.
One last thing about modded Minecraft: Since I last played, there has been a rather hard push for competition to the mod-loader Forge, and CtE in both flavors uses a mod loader I haven't used before. I must say, other than the smaller number of mods supported, it loads Minecraft MUCH faster than Forge, and seems to have fewer bugs in the final product. I don't have the name of it on hand, but it's rather good. I hope that when the Java version of 1.17 is released later this year that we see a lot of multi-loader support for mods... or a dramatic improvement in Forge performance.