But at the same time, the game has been filled with huge artificial difficulty, by making it nearly random to find particular materiel you want. And the "fix" was to make them more abundant. The Modding Community addressed this by creating Creative Mode, where it completely bypasses the incredibly unrewarding time sink of finding materiels.
By saying that you just proved that the community knows jackshit about what makes Minecraft so addicting.
People play Minecraft for a variety of reasons. It is not just about being creative, because we have a LOT of games where you can be creative without having to grind for the materials. (GMOD, Little Big Planet 1-2, the 5 zillion Minecraft ripoffs, etc etc.)
Why do you think people find it that much more satisfying to build something in Minecraft rather than any of these games? It IS because of the fact that you need to hunt for the materials. Any Minecraft creation is that much more impressive if the person who made it actually acquired the Materials.
[..] making Sane Geology for Minecraft, eg, making it so that you can purposefully find materiel that you want from environmental clues.
I'll give you that. Finding anything interesting in Minecrafts underground is very much like playing the slot machine. But honestly, would adding environmental clues really be the best idea? Would anyone other than a geologist even notice these clues? I consider myself relatively wellread. But I honestly would not notice these clues unless I looked it up on the wiki. Also it would be very much a hassle to balance and implement.
TL:DR Notch is the Stephanie Myers of the video game design world.
Tasteful..
I wish I could write as beautifully as you, but my mind was always better with numbers.
But I totally agree on one point, the ender dragon was probably not the best idea.
While it did add an interesting goal for when me and my friends were playing. We have had a few playthroughs where we started out in the game, and then tried to make it to the end without dying. For the less vocal majority of people, it did just that, add some arbitrary point to the game.
But in the end it did not really fit into Minecraft all that well, he could have used the development time to some more blocks to play with. Also the villages could have been implemented better.