Coke Oven Bricks do not appear to drop when broken with any other mode than Block Mode on the Awakened Ichorium Pickaxe. Nothing really important but something I figured I'd give a heads up on.
I noticed something similiar to this when playing on Infinity. It happens with quite a few Railcraft blocks for me. In some cases it didn't drop anything; other times (like with railcraft's metal fence posts) it would revert it back to the default color of brown.
Yes slind, its on infinity. This situation stems from the tile-entity research you asked for. There was quite a few at the location that were loaded.
No, just over-use for design's sake. Was also (at least, cannot remember exactly) 4x (5x5x5) steel tanks in the same chunk, which is why I issued the request for removal of these, and talked over alternatives to these.