For a gold farm... Just mine in Mesa. And the Block Hopper idea... Typing /home (name) gives you swag points so we don't need one. I mean not like this is a Tekkit server with all the fancy tech and stuff.
1. I don't really see why you'd need a gold farm? Yes there is the healing axe, but you cold mine to get that just fine, or buy from players, other than that I don't quite see why gold farms are needed - much less being worth changing the nether difficulty. 2. I think configurable PF hoppers could be cool - like you custom configure what items you want to go into each hopper - I'm not sure if mining blocks or any items should be added - but like, say you had 2 layers of PF hoppers on a farm, one where the hoppers only pick up, say, carrots, and one where the only pick up potatoes - so you could have 2 different PF hopper storages on the same chunk, I think that would be a really cool addition - but at the same time, I'm not sure the effort that would go into making that big of a change would be worth it when the hoppers work perfectly fine as they are now.