Somewhat disappointed

I used MCreator about a year ago. I found it interesting but I was unwilling to invest the time to learn it. But of late I have been playing a lot of Minecraft with my grandson. (Yes, I'm that old.) So over the last week I have done a deep dive into Block Bench and MCreator and I have some observations. I like Block Bench. It is very quick and easy to learn. You can make models quickly. Then I set off to learn MCreator. Having some experience writing mods for other games I decided to start with a slightly more complex project. I always liked Machine Muse's power armor so I decided to make something like that. A bit of a learning curve but everything went well and it is a done project with features like flight, water breathing, auto healing, night vision, teleportation etc. So on to my next project. I thought something like Da Vinci's vessels but I think that was a bit too ambitious so throttled back to a small flying submarine that could deploy and stow a small shelter. Again more learning and a nice mod. Then I made my mistake! Why not make it an animated entity that changes shape as it changes movement mode. I found out that there is no animation sub system in Minecraft. Decided I did not want to go with timers and key frame switching. So I opted to try Nerdy's GeckoLib. I got it done but only in the test client. When I attempted to load it in my play through, Minecraft complained about missing libraries and the like. Not that big of a deal, I'll just roll my project back to before the horror of animation. Nope! Gecko refuses to leave. Not only did it corrupt my vehicle mod. It corrupted projects that never had any animation in them, projects that were not even opened while I had Gecko installed. Block Bench now tries to make everything a Gecko model. None of my work will load in Minecraft anymore. It won't compile! I get screens of errors. Most of my projects won't open in MCreator any more either. Anyone out there have any ideas on how I might clean this mess up?