[jon-wood]

I think the problem is that Minecraft caters to a huge range of tastes. I fully agree with you, I’d much rather have more options for automation and building fun machinery but my son is deeply into the PvP side of things where the new combat options are hugely appealing, and lead to new ways of playing the game. That’s barely scratching the surface, you’ve also got the speed runners, the boat racers, the people using it as a place to shoot weird films, the drop map obsessives, and the speed bridgers competing to bridge from one point to another as fast as possible. It’s almost impossible to accommodate everyone all the time.

[nottorp]

> my son is deeply into the PvP side of things where the new combat options are hugely appealing

But is he not using mods because he doesn't want to, or just because he hasn't got into it yet? Perhaps soon he'll run into a must-have java mod and drop bedrock.

Personally I learned about MC and even that there are mods by helping my then 12 year old daughter install them...

[jon-wood]

Oh he's hard into the world of Java edition mods, my point was more that they're adding combat options to the core game because there's a huge audience demanding more combat options.