How do you measure fun? People will always rush to that excuse if it's not properly defined. And not everyone finds the same things fun. Especially if you are looking to try and 10x your audience.
Most won’t fix bugs in non-competitive games are things that don’t prevent players from engaging the intended gameplay loop and are unlikely to be encountered randomly. Who cares if you can endlessly pickpocket that one npc in oblivion. No one but the people who want to exploit will ever be affected and why stop them if that’s what they want.
In competitive games unintended mechanics are much more frequently patched but there are plenty of examples that are straight up iconic. Wave dashing in melee, magnum damage in Halo CE, sword cancelling in halo 2, b-hopping and surfing in CS.
And when you get to games like mmos where saving time is of major value glitches are like gifts. I am still mad they patched out logout skips in classic wow.
TNT duping is a good example. It’s basically impossible to accidentally run in to this glitch, but the community has built tons of mechanisms around using it and generally like it.
Patching it out would be more “correct” but serve to only limit user creativity and inventions.
TNT duping is a classic example of how players will optimize the fun out of the game if you give them a chance. Your claim that people won't accidentally run into is not true as it only takes one YouTube tutorial to discover it. Many popular farm designs rely on it so it is not hard to stumble upon it. Remember this is a game where people had to use third party sites to figure out how to discover how to craft anything. I don't think it's fair to discount discovering things on 3rd party sites.
> it only takes one YouTube tutorial to discover it
And game developers who care about this are the ones that preemptively take the fun out of games. If someone ruins their experience by looking at tutorials that's entirely self afflicted.
Tbh I think Minecraft players enjoy creating item farms. It’s just part of the game progression at this point.
Meanwhile some non bugged workflows like breaking and replacing the lectern a million times to get the right trade exist because the enchanting table is so horribly broken no one would use it.
When I bought Minecraft, most things weren't renewable. Now, late-game players don't even have to go mining. Or craft that much.
The enchanting table used to be a rare reward. You had to get to level 50 and roll the dice once. You get a random upgrade to one item and that's it, you're stuck with it. It was gambling. Now the cost is trivial after several reductions, and people minmax their enchantments, and Repair means you never have to re-roll, and you can get all your enchantments anyway from villagers if you do a bunch of ridiculous nonsense. That's an accidental game that overtook the actual game, and it seems like not a very good one.
also worth noting - in beta, you could create item farms if you installed mods allowing you to create item farms - besides the cactus farm which was possible since cactuses were added to the game (and there's a very silly reason why they are possible) and the obvious intended farms like wheat.