You can get around that easily enough with another popular mod that I already recommend for general use, No Mobs Spawning On Trees, which lets you configure basically everything about where, when and how a mob will spawn. To get around the optifine issue, you literally dump the entirety of greg’s smooth and spawn-protected rocks for it.
I understand the issue with optifine and it’s annoying, but its merits definitely outstrip the hoops you have to jump through to get it to work properly with all mods in a 1.7 modpack. Optifine D6 coupled with fastcraft 1.23 (.25 is a gutted version made to have compat with later versions of OF from D7 and beyond, when they bundled together the shaders mod and broke compat with half their base) and betterfps leads to huge FPS improvements on older hardware.