I hate vanilla Minecraft servers. Now before you probably get all mad or something, I will exclude vanilla Minecraft servers that are:

1. Private/whitelisted
2. Have a lot of effort put into them (things like custom scripts and other things from command blocks that actually make the game unique.

The reason I hate vanilla Minecraft servers is mostly because no effort is put into them. Like I said, there are a few where people actually put time and effort into them and I'm excluding them. It takes no effort at all to just buy a host, put vanilla on it, and make it public. The spawn will get griefed as well as probably everything else. It's just altogether not a good idea.

But I like vanilla survival!

You don't need Vanilla to emulate vanilla survival. Having pure vanilla will usually, like I said, end up in major griefing. You should protect the spawn and add Essentials at least to basically make the gameplay enjoyable but I recommend adding protection for players.

But vanilla is how Minecraft is supposed to be!!1!one!

Well, not exactly. Minecraft is basically made for people to modify the game. Vanilla is really only for making a small server for close friends or making a private whitelisted server. Having at least CraftBukkit or Spigot with basic plugins should be necessary or your server will look like it's been blown up with 1,000 TNT.

The Minecraft community has attracted much younger audiences and not all of the younger audiences are very mature. If you make a great unprotected creation on a public Minecraft server then you're just asking to be griefed which is really sad.

Like I said, there are quality Vanilla Minecraft servers out there and the reason is because they put a lot of effort and time into making their server not only grief proof, but usually adding additions to the game through command blocks.

You can disagree with me all you want, but unless you want your server completely griefed then I recommend at least having basic plugins to prevent this.