I know that in the end, the only mod you can balance against is your own, but it seems off that your biggest, most expensive engine is evenly matched (by which I mean i gave them both the same amount of Steam and they produced about the same amount of power (though the engine took much longer to do it due to its heatup/cooldown)) with Thermal Expansion's cheapest dynamo. Any user in a modpack would have no incentive to use your engines.

Close this if you disagree, I just feel this point needed to be made.

It's a fair criticism.
I don't speak for CJ, however I feel that Railcraft is a bit about doing things big rather than the
easiest way.
After all, rail lines can just be replaced with teleporting mods/tesserects. However those mechanics are uninteresting to me.

That's one of the points of Railcraft. It is much more expensive than other mods, and @Yopu has a very good point. You could replace 90% of the point in Railcraft with things in mods like ThermalExpansion and save time and resources, but where is the fun in placing down 3 Tesseracts instead of a complicated rail line? Railcraft never balanced itself against other mods like ThermalExpansion and I think it is doing very well having been balanced in itself.

I agree, this issue should be closed.

I think I'll let @CovertJaguar weigh in on this before it gets closed.

Ok, lets make one thing clear. My engines came first. Thermal Expansion's Dynamo's came much much later and were undoubtedly 'designed/copied' specifically to be more OP than my engines. Attempting to match anything in Thermal Expansion is a fools game. Every time me or anyone else has tried it, TE just buffed their version to maintain the same power difference. TE's popularity is a direct result of this active effort to leach players away from valid mechanics in other mods by offering a slightly better version in their own. I have no intention of playing their game.

I know your engines came first. Back in 1.4, I had a great setup with them, I had more power than I knew what to do with. I also know that the dynamos can get incredibly powerful now. I was only thinking that with the switch to RF, buffing the engines may be something you'd want to consider.

No point, as stated above. It would just give TE a reason to buff theirs even further.

My final suggestion before I give up on this subject is this:
Add a config option that sets the base power of the Engines.
I:BaseEnginePower=20
or something like that.
Have the max RF/t of the engines based on that (Hobbyist is set to it, Commercial is set to 2x it, etc).
Important: Changing the config option doesn't change the Steam/Power ratio, just changes how fast the engines will make that power.

That wouldn't be too difficult to implement. I could likely knock it out
tomorrow. It'd be up to @CovertJaguar if we do it though.

I'd be willing to look into how much work it would be.

I suppose you could, but its probably not as simple as just scaling the output. You'd also need to scale the capacity and who knows what else...