&gt;One dude is maintaining Forge&#x2F;MinecraftCodersPack&#x2F;Fernflower, which powers pretty much every mod<p>Forge is maintained by cpw and Lex, as well as a large community of modders.  MCP is a completely different project and is still headed by Searge and ProfMobius (now with Mojang), among others.  And I&#x27;m not sure what Fernflower has to do with anything.<p>&gt;Ad-infested forums and adfly links are the preferred way of distributing mods<p>Partially true.  Many have moved to Curse or CurseForge (which isn&#x27;t any better).<p>&gt;The last moddable client version is 1.8.0, 1.9 is out.<p>1.9 is not out, and work cannot even begin on enabling 1.9 mods until MCP is released.  They&#x27;d be working with obfuscated code otherwise.<p>&gt;Getting a mod started is really difficult, and it&#x27;s not clear what should&#x2F;shouldn&#x27;t be in source control.<p>Having just recently gone through this, I wouldn&#x27;t say it&#x27;s that bad.  It will generate a .gitignore file for you, and set up workspaces for both IDEA and Eclipse.  Other IDEs may be more difficult to setup.