So 1.7 is out

You talk as if all these futures were removed from the game ... They're still there, you can still build beacons and ignore cords, you don't have to go to the end, or enchant, or use potions, nobody forces you to. The generation is different but in exchange you get now more biomes with more cool stuff such as ruins - that is called progress, you can't remain stuck in the same place over and over again. How many new cool futures they added, hell the map support now is crazy and how many cools things were made with that.

I'll take a contrary POV.

The mapmaking features are incredible. /summon, /setblock, and /testforblock have amazing potential. The new canyons are very nice. I love Amplified, although a Cubic Chunks would still be amazing. The render features allowing for multiple transparent things is incredible, and I love stained glass. Fishing got the updates it needed. Resource packs are great, and the server changes seem to be good after a bit of tweaking. The new biomes, amazing. Allowing NBT tags in game makes me super happy.
Honestly, this is what a good MC update should be to me. The biome color sliding scale is a good change that needed to happen. The new flowers are good.

I guess the only recent change I really hated was horses, and before that, enchanting/brewing felt a bit meh. The recent updates have really done a ton to allow mapmaking.

Robotnik wrote:

I miss the days when you had to SEARCH for clay. When it was so rare sometimes you'd go so far to try and find it. When we had sand beaches that were even, nice, actually conformed to the terrain. When the ocean was smooth, and sand, not an ugly conglomerate of dirt, clay, and sand circles. When an isolated island was something to die for. When floating islands and insane geography was the norm, before the introduction of a supposed "End," before it turned more into an RPG rather than an open sandbox it had once been, where it was once about the building rather than getting the best enchantment, about the creativity you could have with limited materials rather than working towards a set of goals that were invariably the same.

I miss those days.

I remember those days! I loved how clay was once rare, and we all bitched about how oceans were too shallow, Then the dev team gave us that weird crop circle dirt/sand/clay ocean shit.

_Shadowcat_ wrote:

oceans were too shallow,

I was not informed of this.

Pretty much the entire new terrain generator introduced in the beta 1.8 update is shit. No variation, no cool structures. Too uninteresting, and it made the game very ugly compared to the way it was.

But meh, no use wishing for the old ways, as it won't come back.

The only difference is that now you don't get canyons at high seed numbers and overall more sharpness, I believe it is fixable , they will prob add proper biomes like that sooner or later. Even if not you will always find a mod to fix your problems, in your case that is one of the biomes mods. Guess the only thing I miss is some old mods combos that I ran before , exploring the Aether for example was cool. On a positive note though many old mods like the Aether or the kingdoms mod are now being resurrected , maybe because of the upcoming mod API ?

I don't think anyone is counting on the mod API anymore. Forge is the closest we are going to get to that.

Yea, once forge was kinda the addon for all the technical mods to work together, the big trio - Industrialcraft, buildcraft and red power. Nowdays pretty much all mods require forge.