Progression feels extremely intimidating because recipes are incredibly deep, requiring a long line of fairly expensive prior investments. It's not rewarding to progress, it just feels like a chore.

Is this intentional and I'm just doing something wrong to make it feel like a slog? Or is this something to be looked at?

A few things to consider:

• There are many things you can do in the early game to get better resource yields. And you can use a steam mining drill for rather easy mining and silk touch.
• Generally, the point is automation and mass crafting. You should really not be crafting each component every single time, but rather craft a reasonable amount of them (maybe 4 in the beginning, then 32 by 32 or stack by stack when you can afford it).
• Make sure easy mode is enabled. Non-easy mode is plain annoying (and getting removed in the next release). AOF4 disabled easy mode by mistake, not sure if it got turned back on.

If you have more specific complaints/suggestions, I'll be happy to point out some shortcut that you might have missed, or reconsider some things. In my experience, MI doesn't feel very grindy, but when it does we try to address the issue. That's where player input helps, of course. :)

So basically treat it like 3D Factorio? I dig it.

As for easy mode, it was on. Since you plan to remove it, perhaps instead of removing easy mode, you make the current "easy mode" into the non-easy mode, then just make the crafting recipes stupid easy.

I'm not smart enough for this mod lmao

It's intended to be 3d factorio. And no, we are not going to maintain two sets of recipes. If you don't like the way the mod is designed to be played (i.e. 3d factorio), don't use it. :)