At the moment your tools provide an effective alternate path to bypass vanilla tools. You can make primogel fairly easily with stone materials which means that you could go stone - ferricore. This progression is hampered without the ability to mine obsidian since you can't go from ferricore to blazegold without getting a diamond pick or building a speedrunner portal to gain access to the nether. Bumping this initial level to diamond tier or otherwise including a method for ferricore to be able to break obsidian would allow access to the nether and preserve progression solely in the mod.
At the moment your tools provide an effective alternate path to bypass vanilla tools. You can make primogel fairly easily with stone materials which means that you could go stone - ferricore. This progression is hampered without the ability to mine obsidian since you can't go from ferricore to blazegold without getting a diamond pick or building a speedrunner portal to gain access to the nether. Bumping this initial level to diamond tier or otherwise including a method for ferricore to be able to break obsidian would allow access to the nether and preserve progression solely in the mod.