As you may have noticed the "final" version of Minecraft has been out for a couple of weeks now so I thought it would be nice to talk a bit about it.
I remember playing Minecraft Alpha, well over a year ago. It was epic! You were thrown into a huge world with huge randomly generated lands. You punched trees to make wood to make a crafting bench to make an axe to chop down trees to make more wood to make a pickaxe to mine some coal to make torches to light up your first ugly shelter so you could survive the creatures of the night. It was great. Then you made a bigger shelter and started mining. You found iron to make better tools and then you ventured further down into the mines that God forgot. You found gold, which was awsome and completely useless, and the mysterious stuff known as redstone; you found underground lava lakes, got blown up by ninja creepers and eventually you found it. Diamond! After hours of hard work you had - unless you forgot to make an iron pickaxe! 
- found your first diamond! And then you dived into an underground lava lake, lost everything and had to start from the spawn point from which you had no idea how to find your epic house. And that was just the beginning of a tale of survival, epic constructions and the evilest evil you have ever met.
This was far from the final version though. Later we got pumpkins, access to hell itself, better terrain generation, some strange blue stuff, wool in all colours, melons, new crazy contraptions, the evil bastards also known as endermen, swamps, epic mountain ranges, epic mushrooms, epic mushroom infected cows and much more! We even got an ending! With ending credits!
While Notch was busy stealing the "It prints money!" line from Nintendo and buying minions to help with his evil plans to screw Bethesda the Minecrafters were hard at work making constructions that blew our minds away. People made awsome pixel art, epic models of everything from the Enterprise to Touhou characters and huge awsome looking buildings. Some people took it to the next step and actually constructed functional computers and monitors! Yeah!
And now, our journey has finally reached The End (literally).
Personally I'm quite happy with what Minecraft has turned into, and I'm not just talking about the game itself. The community is great and provides awsome mods to flesh out your experience even more. Don't like the default textures? Download user-created ones! Want awsome looking water with shader effects? You can get it!
But, now that Minecraft has been released in it's final form (we might still get new content) I feel somewhat empty inside. I liked playing around in Minecraft and dreaming of what kind of features the future would bring. Most new stuff were great additions, but closer to release more and more of the added content felt somewhat...useless? Villages were cool, but they get old fast and the villagers are just pointless. I love the terrain generator brought by the 1.8 update. Enchantments are cool. Potions are kinda weird as once you're finally able to brew potions they feel useless as when you finally get them you really don't need them any more. Much work for little to no gain.
I don't know what people think about the ending area and the final boss. Imo it's a nice addition but is it really necessary? Do we really need an ending?
In many cases I feel that Mojang should have put resources into fleshing out the already existing features instead of creating useless ones like the villagers. Imo it almost feels like they got lost and only sort of knew what they were doing. The latest additions are pretty much hit and miss in my book.
"Hey, you can enchant your equipment now! You can make a pickaxe that have a chance of giving you two diamonds instead of one, and you can get blocks that you couldn't get before!"
"Wow, this is awsome!" *runs away to level grind*
"Hey, look at this! You can make potions now!"
"Cool, what are they good for?"
"..."
"Look at the villagers! You can....they can...uh...looks, a creeper!" *runs*
I speak for myself but I'd easily swap potions and villagers for new building options. Wool halfblocks would be great for starters. Being able to place chests next to each other would be great as well. These are both quite simple and easily implementable features. Sure, you can't get everything but...oh well.
Now, I don't want this to end with rant. I really love Minecraft. I have invested hundreds and hundreds of hours into it and I'm still far from done. It's one of my favourite games of 2011 and of all time. If you are interested you should try it out or atleast check out some Let's Plays on youtube. I was introduced by the videos made by davidr64yt but those videos are all from the alpha version. Another great Let's Play series that is still active is the one by Coestar and those video range from the Alpha days to version 1.0.
If you're interested in the VGChartz server then go here.
So what's your Minecraft story? What do you think about 1.0? Which dreams were fulfilled and which dreams are still dreams? Let the talking begin! And while I did it you don't have to write a huge wall of text if you don't want to. 
