The trading and new enchanting system definitely ruined it a bit.
I recently went on a new 1.3 vanilla survival server and joined a town. Soon I had Efficiency 2 and Unbreaking 2 on my pick, several protection enchants on my armor, a sharp 2 and knockback 2 diamond sword, and all that xp came from mining. I wasn't even using xray to find tonnes of diamonds or anything like that. Also, the enchantment table had about 4 bookshelves and I was still able to get those nice enchants.
And the trading system is just sad....emeralds are extremely rare to find underground, but anyone with a nice sugarcane farm and easily get lots of emeralds by trading paper...and then you can get fairly cheap diamond gear. It's also unbalanced, where things are overpriced or underpriced.
EDIT: Anyone ever seen the Mindcrack Ultra Harcore series? That's what hardcore mode should be like, and every other mode be adjusted to be slightly harder than before. I'm talking cave spider poisoning on every difficulty (except peaceful of course), hard difficulty creeper damage on normal at least, instead of normal creeper damage being the same as easy.
