You never had this ball, it has forever bounced outside of your grasp.
The ball is unlimited legos. It is building whatever you want with these highly modular pieces with no restraint. More different legos would be appreciated, but so long as I have a limitless amount of what I got, there is no problem from me whatsoever. Heck, we have not even tapped the full creative potential of the blocks we have, and I still have not gotten my mitts on mass amounts of the new stuff in 1.0.
I'm not going to go so far as say you are playing the game wrong, but arguments for the game not being developed properly should be taken as subjectively as how people play it.
Different fun for different people, I suppose. I prefer to use my creativity to solve problems and overcome obstacles, and I would love it if Minecraft presented some more obstacles that can be solved with creative building. Once you've got a shelter and farm, everything else is just swords, stairs and bridges. You can make them prettier and bigger of course, and that is lots of fun too, but it certainly doesn't last forever for me personally.
Being able to build anything I want with unlimited resources doesn't somehow turn into unlimited fun for me. If that were true, I'd go to the nearest beach with a spade and bucket and have fun forever. Once I know how it works, there's nothing really new. Sorta like numbers. It's exciting to learn how to count to 20, but once you know how to count properly you could count to infinity and never be surprised by the next number. Prime numbers though, those are fun.
Of course, that's how I experience the game. People with a different form of creativity, the art kind, will have oodles of fun just building amazing stuff alone or with friends.
All in all, it's one kind of creativity versus another. Neither of us are wrong, I just find it sad that Minecraft isn't really focusing on building as a problem solver in the latest updates.