Like most of the rest of the community I am very excited about the updates to come in 1.8.  All of these snapshots have really given me a good taste of where the developers want to take the game.  They have added the fences and doors in different wood textures, 3 new types of stone, several new types of bocks, armor stands, new customized world generation options, new hostile undersea mobs, they even added mutton (which was a long wait) and rabbits.  While all of the things have some use I find that the game is still mostly limited.  But I must say as much as I live the new features I find myself still wishing there were more features.  

I recently revisited a very old mod that was called the Better than Wolves mod.  This mod when it was first released added many exciting things to Minecraft.  Some of the things added in BTW mod were even later adopted into Minecraft (namely the hopper and the cauldron).  BTW mod also added hemp to the game which was one of the first crops cultivated by man because of its many uses.  Obviously this would be controversial for Mojang yet it was still a great idea.  They added the ability to create a myriad of simple machine that could be used to enhance the game and make it a real challenge to make your world technologically advanced.
 
One of most obvious mechanical additions to the game was the ability to power things with water and wind.  Vanilla Minecraft has always been a very basic game using the surrounding resources to craft new better tools and things for your survival so naturally water wheels and wind mills fit this.  With the windmills and waterwheels they added features such as millstones and saws that did even more to enhance the game.  You could use the millstone to grind wheat into flour which could be cooked into bread which is far more accurate as to how bread is truely made.  You could also grind hemp into fibers to be crafted into rope to be used in pulleys and other redstone machines.  With the saw you could use it to create planks and even further refine planks into half blocks (later added only as slabs) that could be placed vertical or horizontal.  And these could be refined into quarter blocks and then even smaller into eigth blocks.  Enabling the player to create very realistic looking furnature and other structures with very fine detail.  

They were many other features of the BTW mod however most of them had little use.  Seeing all of these new updates to come I wondered if perhaps Mojang would take Minecraft in this direction making Minecraft more technological in nature.  After all they are adding more resources that could potentially have even greater use if applied properly.  I felt it was necessary to write this to make people think about where Minecraft is headed and the direction they want it to go.  Are these two paths the same?  I believe Mojang will stand a far better chance if they add new more usable features into the game that still retain the integrity of the naturalist survival concept upon which it was based.  However as it appears presently the Minecraft developement team have not added any extremely useful updates in the 1.8 previews.  What do you think?