You know, I actually really like the inclusion of gold tools in Minecraft being totally or borderline fucking useless. Especially in Alpha and Beta. That's cool! You have these pretty yellow items that are quite costly to make but are almost purely aesthetic due to being sorely outclassed, but they're still there if you want to be ill or lavish.
They have a feeling, like having a dream that somebody sent you uranium in the mail. Also let's take ourselves back to Minecraft Alpha where they had the same level of block-obtain functionality as in Beta AND the terrible durability, but STILL didn't break blocks any faster than a stone pickaxe. That's how gold was before Beta. Remember that gold cannot mine gold in all retro vanilla versions. And honestly, if you're custom-map inclined and inventive-minded, you could quite easily theme a Minecraft 1.8 survival challenge map around predominant use of gold by the player character. With some intelligent command block integration you could take a block that a gold pickaxe can mine - say, yellow stained clay - and automatically turn its clay drop into a gold ingot or gold ore drop. At one point I actually planned to do that. Often when a Minecraft feature is useless, a custom piece of Minecraft media can invent a use for it. Though I don't try to make custom maps now. Because of all this, I basically never knew what it was about the feature that got the 2010's fanbase frequently so annoyed about it. Unlike some bullshit, gold tools as a feature are extremely easy to ignore. For some reason gold as a tool material was more hated in the Minecraft fandom historically than enchantments or the hunger mechanic in some places. Gold tools are good for machinima type content too. This material has a vibe. I also think this kind of tool is great at being spooky enough for Halloween. It's a haunting set of sprites. And this is to say almost nothing of the armour.
