Honestly, the DDOS on Minecraft seems a bit too... convenient to me. I'm going to kick into paranoid conspiracy theory time here.
Notch has, for some time, fairly regularly released at least 1 to 2 updates per week, one which was special (Secret Fridays), and usually one on Monday or Tuesday to fix whatever got broken. He eventually basically laxed off on that, eventually releasing less, until he basically stopped a couple weeks before announcing the Halloween update. My personal theory here is he was just feeling like not working, but didn't want to say that, so he just knocked off work and did some of the work getting the company going.
Now, for the Halloween update, he had at least half of it done within like a week, since then it's been polishing, except for a bit (By his own admission, biomes are basically just slight modifications of the code he had when he kept "missing" the Secret Friday deadlines for it, at least last time I checked). So, what's my conspiracy theory, you might ask? Why, simple! Notch disabled his own servers and termed it a DDOS, in order to buy himself time and seem more busy, thereby keeping people from begging him to release early, as well as a possible excuse should he "somehow" miss the current hard deadline of Oct. 31.
Now, for me, I know he's gonna miss release dates, I've sorta lost any real faith in Notch since he released things like milk (Still useless), chicken eggs (Still useless), a compass that only points home, SMP, etc. So I'm not really bothered by him missing dates. But for people who think he's some kinda living god, or for people who thought every update he made was completely perfect, those people are going to be get emotional about his remissions. The people who get used to the updates will get angry, and the people who think he's god will claim that he's perfect and absolutely must be making the best update ever. This leads to a huge powder keg, liable to explode at any moment. You can see it every day on their forums, someone makes any kind of suggestion, and all the fans come out the woodwork to eat him alive about how Notch and Minecraft are perfect, or people posting angry threads about upcoming changes. Frankly, I can't stand the place, especially when compared to a place like the Bay 12 Forums.
Comparing the Minecraft community with the Dwarves found here, is like comparing fans of Halo with appreciators of fine wine. Sure, Halo might be alright on it's own, but the people who worship it are the problem, while we sit around and laugh, drinking and preparing to take over the world, stepping over the broken skulls of our enemies with our stubby little legs.