Please do comment if something is wrong or lacking, also keep it to majors unless the minor has a breaking change which mod devs who are maybe coming back to the modding scene from an older version should know about
List of versions and how they affect modders best I can tell:
1.6->1.7:
- resources became way better
- ig block models were defined in code in 1.6
- as well as texture atlases needing to be manually stitched instead of being a collection of 16x textures that the game stitches at runtime
1.7->1.7.2: