Drawing entire rectangles individually with a single call? Come on, where's your spirit of adventure?

Why not simply use something like the original TIS-100 display protocol, starting at an X and Y coordinate and drawing a horizontal sequence of colors until you hit a stop?

Yes, it would be clunky and difficult to use, but I thought that was sort of the point - to create an extremely flexible computing system more powerful than regular redstone, which nonetheless required solving TIS-100-like puzzles to use, because they naturally arose through the peculiar architecture. There really aren't enough mods that are puzzles to use in and of themselves.

Honestly, given the relative obscurity of TIS-100, the fact that the display module isn't terribly useful, and the short time the mod's been out for, I assumed there weren't enough existing builds to worry about breaking.

Certainly I'd never suggest a major change in basic functionality on a more established mod.

Hmm... what about the possibility of having two different "modes" of the screen? (can be switched by shift right clicking?)
Then the harder mode could have a "reward" for it, such as a higher resolution?

I dunno, having two entirely different protocols simultaneously seems like it'd be a lot of work for the dev. I mean, it might not be, I don't know.

There are already a good number of differences to TIS-100 (such as the number range or the existence of bitwise operations). The fact that this behaves differently to the way TIS-100's visualization nodes work was deliberate, to avoid spamming network packets even more than the mod already does. Sending a packet for each changed pixel when it's more practical to just draw a larger rectangle anyway just isn't a very sane option. Plus while the how is still a large part of the fun in TIS-3D, being able to actually do something useful with it is more important than in TIS-100 ;-)

But this would break existing builds...

I understand. The number range and existence of bitwise operations seemed pretty necessary to me to do anything useful with redstone and real control situations at all; I don't begrudge you those in the least.

I think I'd prefer the TIS-100 display style nonetheless, because various impressive examples of TIS-100 sandbox code have shown that you really can do useful stuff with it (Pong! A drawing program! Arbitrary image display! Sprites!) but if it'd spam network packets (which I guess it would, because it would only draw one pixel at a time) I understand completely. Sorry to bother you!