Is Botania a tech mod or a magic mod? What is its goal, and what is its failure?
Its goal is to make magic a mechanic that's as strong as the weapons or armor you use in MMOs. The failures of Botania were things we should be able to do, but decided to do ourselves in the game engine. Or, to put it in game development terminology, we thought it would be a lot easier to add actual swords or jetpacks into the game than build a new engine that would support them.
I think that's probably why botania doesn't support a lot of things you'd expect from a magic mechanic in an MMO: it's more complicated. Instead of having to build an engine to support spellcasters, we just wanted to be able to support spellcasters and the magic they use in Botania. Also, since it's a tech mod, we wanted to keep a lot of its mechanics out of the vanilla game, for which we have permission.
I'm going to admit something that might surprise you: this game started out with "magic items" as a feature. They were a huge feature that was pretty well-liked at the start of development. Unfortunately, this was a game that went through a lot of cycles of both "building up" and "destruction". Eventually we had a lot of magic-using players who felt like they were "caught between games," being expected to deal with both MMO mechanics and magic in the same game. By the time we released our first patches, we decided that there wasn't much of a need for magic items in Botania, so we cut them.
Why would I even want to play a magic mod?
In Botania, the goal is to be able to create and play as whatever you want, because of the massive flexibility you have with the building system, the freeform world creation, and the vast amount of possibilities available with the main quests. The only limitation is your imagination.