Minecraft's creative menu would be a mess to navigate without the tabs. NEI should have a "tabs" feature to assist in the player's navigation. Ideally, these could be configured by the modpack maker. Some uses could be to separate resources from machines from building blocks from tools, separating by mod, or in the case of a pack like sevtech, organizing by age. The effect this could have on the modded experience cannot be understated. Currently, the NEI menu even with redundant items hidden is extremely busy, daunting, and unorganized. Please consider this necessary feature.

This is what subsets were for, 1.13 its getting rewritten so something like this is planned.