I understand what you guys are saying, but I still think that fighting to keep the game as close to vanilla as possible was a worthwhile cause. 

If it's just me though, I lose.

And because of my tastes, I won't enjoy playing it with starting resources and without competitiveness. It would be cool if I could ignore the competitive bit, but then it just wouldn't be minecraft for me. If I'm playing minecraft I wanna play minecraft. There are other ways to dick around with friends for the sake of it.