Actually, just the other day, Akkarin on the Spigot IRC provided me with this link.
https://github.com/Evil-Co/NBT-Lib
The example code for using it seems more bloated and messy to me. It has a lot of extra imports:
import org.junit.Assert;
import org.junit.Test;
import org.junit.runner.RunWith;
import org.mockito.runners.MockitoJUnitRunner;
Im still trying to decide its value.
We did look at developing mods with forge but many of the users in our community say they don't have systems that are powerful enough to run it. A while ago we provide a Crash Landing server for them to try, however many of them either timed out before they could establish a connection to the server, or couldn't get the forge client to run at all.
I am still considering developing a Forge modded server but I still don't know much about it, for instance, if a server is not heavily modded, can it still be loaded with a normal client? How large is the community? Also, when you look at something like life in the woods, im not sure anyone that downloads Forge would be interested in playing what I have to offer. Im a sole programmer and have never even looked at re-texturing. Don't get me wrong, im sure I have something to offer, however probably not anything significant enough by myself compared to what teams of developers can produce.