Trying to come up with a summary of my various Minecraft criticisms:
Minecraft's biggest strength is its low-fidelity building/digging/mining/terrain reshaping (which I'll just referring to as "Building" for simplicity) model, and it handles its other two pillars (exploration and combat) a lot worse. Combat this shallow would not be tolerated in a 3rd person action adventure game. That's fine, because Minecraft isn't a third person action adventure game, buuuuuut
Minecraft also struggles to motivate players to engage with building in ways it does not struggle to encourage combat or exploration. Most rewards for engaging with exploration and combat are new ways to do exploration or combat. Most rewards for building are new ways to do exploration or combat. (The rewards that do encourage building are mostly niche [e.g. sponges] or only serve to reduce timesinks.)
The enchanting table is a good example of this mismatch. A full enchantment table setup takes physical space, encouraging players to thinking about they want to integrate it into what they've built. Do you make a new room? A functionality-first basement? A new building? Did you plan ahead and dedicate space to it when you started? These are the kinds of decisions that motivate players to build. What do they get for this engagement? Three¹ out of thirty seven non-treasure enchantments (the enchantments you can actually get from an enchantment table) are building or mining focused, another three² are general-utility, and thirty one are combat or exploration focused. What are we feeding into here? What kinds of play does this encourage?
Because Minecraft rewards players for exploration and combat and does not reward players for building, many players find when they inevitably run out of pre-made content to explore or fight that they haven't actually invested anything tangible or emotional into the things they've made. They never had any reason to! They get this paradoxical sense that they've both run out of things to do and haven't made any real progress, get discouraged, and stop playing. (This is not their fault for "playing the game wrong" or "being too speedrun-rotted".)
Minecraft is hostile to solving problems with building and does not benefit from it, besides perhaps in implementation costs (which are real, don't get me wrong). Highly technical "farms" and similar builds, which are mostly developed by full-time professional community members familiar with the engine-level details of the game's implementation and then simply copied verbatim by fans into their own worlds, are an emergent attempt to overcome this hostility from within. Minecraft says "you can't build something to get a Totem of Undying, you have to do that with Exploration and Combat", and frustrated players find a way around. Minecraft says "you can't build something to make iron; you have to do that with Exploration and Combat, or by holding 'left click' for a really long time" and frustrated players find ways around. Minecraft says "you can't get these enchantments from building, you have to get them from Exploration and Combat" and frustrated players find a way around.
Over time, these professional technical players have constructed a sort of quasi-canonical tail to the progression tree through Building, the fun part, instead of Exploration and Combat. Unfortunately for most players, progressing along this tail does not actually mean any decision-making, and thus they still don't emotionally engage with what they build. That's not their Iron Farm, that's Tango's Iron Farm which they put the hours into copying verbatim. It's a bad stopgap solution to their design problem and they should stop relying on it.
Many versions of Minecraft from early in its development history (particularly those before the Adventure Update) do this better by sheer force of negative space. Most resources feed into building materials, exploration is about finding building resources or finding specific places to build in, and combat serves as a subtle pressure to create infrastructure. These versions are not always more fun to play, and they don't come out looking too great if we try to treat them like complete finished works, but they are usually more consistently rewarding.
If modern Minecraft wants to truly fix these problems, they'll need to gut and rebuild from scratch a majority of their current content to do it. This will never happen. There are improvements they can make, for sure, but an actual solution to the problem would alienate their customers and take years to implement. Microsoft would never allow it, even if the team thought it was feasible, which they likely don't.
The way to improve is by tying progression closer to building, rather than tool tiers. Don't take away from player agency and lock them behind specific play styles; rather give players things they can build to benefit them, and attach real decisions to those builds. Workbenches with floorspace requirements (like the enchantment table), permanent resource-producing and utility blocks that can't be moved (like spawners, amethyst geodes, or End portals), crops with sunlight and space and time requirements (like wheat and carrots and potatoes and so forth, but also saplings), structures with specific associated aesthetics (like the Nether portal), ways to make useful infrastructure (like train networks), and so on and so forth. Subtle things that don't force anyone to play in any particular way, but which do give all players a reason to engage. Copy-the-meta Andys can still just copy the meta, so long as we're careful to make sure that we aren't unintentionally punishing players for not copying the meta. If everyone is having a fun and rewarding time, that's enough.
Forcing players to build to overcome explicit mechanical barriers can be a valuable tool, but should be limited to non-Overworld dimensions or other explicit opt-ins; like how Mining Fatigue forces players to use combat to overcome explicit mechanical barriers but only comes into player when players choose to seek out Ocean Monuments.
¹Efficiency, Fortune and Silk Touch
²Luck of the Sea, Lure, and Unbreaking
