ive been playing this game since 2011 when i was in middle school and im still coming back to it. im sinking hours into it after work while my puppy sleeps next to my desk and my gf is working evening shift. its such a cozy game and reminds me of when i spent all day after school playing MC and other games w friends. its not just nostalgia tho, its just such a cute game that can be whatever the player wants. after all this time, i still derive so much joy from exploring a new world, building a sprawling estate, spelunking, and even just mining. even tho MC doesnt track ur hours played, im certain its my most played game
just wanted to share that i love this game 
I used to not get Minecraft. Like, I had no issues with it, completely respected people enjoying it and got its cultural impact, but i was puzzled at what was there to keep people engaged.
Then I had a kid, and it clicked for me: young people get into it because it fits the way young people engage in play. Young people do free form play, they act out scenarios, they like having a lot of things in the sandbox not because it’s a goal or because the game will give your a Game Completed screen for getting them, but because it gives them a lot to act out with. It made me realize that in a lot of ways what we had as “cut your teeth” games when I was young weren’t reflections of innate play or core gaming, but were more due to technological limitations and contexts of early games.
Notch is still a dick though.
Of course, but he basically just ripped off other projects (dwarf fortress, infiniminer) and coded poorly, and a great deal of his work has been gutted and replaced over the years.
Don't forget the villagers who are designed to be a Jewish caricature (big nose) and is protected by a golem.
Or the Endermen . . .
Oh god... They were always just "haha, teleporting block guy" to me. I have now come to a dark realization.
First person dwarf fortress or dungeon keeper-like dwarf fortress sounds like it would be awesome.
Also more awesome would be a dwarf fortress AI engine that plays the game for you but allows you to make the changes you think would be more interesting (like maybe giving you the chance to decide layout beforehand if you so wished).
It's a lot more than just a regular sandbox for me. I started playing it very early on, but I was in high school and had played plenty of other games my entire life. The thing that makes MC special (on PC at least) is that it can become so much more than the base game. It creates a foundation, but there are so many mods to change things up. I also loved making Redstone things. The largest being a large 8-segment display of a clock with something like 32 bits for the time and 1-second precision. It's where I learned how to do electrical engineering and logic gates, even though I was already interested in programming.
With the modding community, it also promoted adding things you think the game needed, and people supported each other. For example I made an anvil mod to repair items, which got fairly popular and is now pretty much exactly how the anvil works in vanilla, except with custom assets which was a lot harder to add back then. The game was whatever you wanted it to be, not just what the developers created.