I run a private server for my friends and I that started out simple, but has slowly been growing in plugins and mods. What started in vanilla, quickly changed to Bukkit for essentials and permissions, and then switched over to MCPC 1.4.5 so we can maintain functionality and add mods.

We kept running into problems with MCPC and the ported mods, so I switched us over to the beta MCPC+ that ports bukkit plugins into vanilla+forge rather than vice-versa, and it has been much better. Eventually we started getting an interest in larger and larger mods (from Balkon's to RailCraft, to BC, to IC2) and we have derailed from the slightly modified from vanilla server.

My question is, with MCPC+ becoming very stable (just in the past month), would it be better to pull the mods from the popular packs (FTB or Tekkit) or switch to their dedicated server jar and launchers and try to add the permissions/essentials pieces?

I don't know because I'm not familiar with the FTB server structure and whether we'll be able to get some of the features that we've been hanging onto with the bukkit ability. There's a lot of features I'd like to hang onto: permissions, essentials, dynmap, multiverse, etc.