Board Thread:General Mod Discussion/@comment-27179278-20161018034950/@comment-25330335-20161018215641

So this has probably been mentioned before, and I'm sorry that I didn't read the above posts, but this is a decision that was made a long time ago. 1.8, in addition to running things more efficiently, also changed a butt-ton of stuff, because making the code run more effeciently does not come without a lot of changes. Those changes changed the way that MC works, so forge had to change it's API to make it workable with the new version. That means that modders have to, among other things, rename thousands of functions, re-code tile-entities, and numerous other fixes. Because subsequent MC updates were built on 1.8, the work for a 1.8 update would have to be done for any subsequent MC versions Mevans cares to support. Now that you know a little more about what is actually required for an update, put yourself in Mevans' shoes and rework your arguments.

Also, there are a lot of features from vanilla that Mevans would either have to work around, or incorporate (take horses for an example). This would be more argument and headache.