Yes but also consider the extensibility accessibility Java gave us. EVERYONE was building Minecraft mods back in the beta days. I might go as far as to say that extensibility is what made Minecraft so great.
What I always found surprising was how many minecraft mods there were despite mojang having absolutely no mod support for the game.
After learning that to make a minecraft mod the process was basically decompile minecraft fight the terrible names provided by the decompiler to make your changes then recompile it, I lost all interest.
No doubt about it. I don't think Minecraft would have gotten as far as fast in the public consciousness without content creators like Yogscast being able to produce so much novel content from modded Minecraft.
After learning that to make a minecraft mod the process was basically decompile minecraft fight the terrible names provided by the decompiler to make your changes then recompile it, I lost all interest.