I've found the way minecraft has evolved over the past 14 years to be unsatisfying for this reason. Most of the games systems feel like they exist for the purpose of being exploited, and the rest of the systems encorage the player to interact with the former.

As an example, if I want to go exploring, I'm thinking I'm going to want food, so I'll want crops either to eat them directly or to breed livestock. If I want to do that in a way that doesn't require waiting I'll need bone meal. But at some point they changed it so you require more bone meal to fully grow. And now the game has funneled me into building a mob grinder when I actually wanted to explore.

Sure, there are mobs out there you can fight who drop those items, and that's more engaging, but "fun" and "effective" are so misaligned in the game currently that I find myself avoiding it. So much so that I end up mostly either playing really old versions that aren't this way (b1.7.3 in particular) or modpacks that do a better job of this kind of progression.

Yes! I also kind of hate feeling like I have to cheese the game to make progress at a reasonable speed.

BUT, I will say I do get a kick out of seeing the strategies and workarounds other people find that I would never even have bothered to try looking for.

Maybe I'm just lazy, or maybe I just feel like there's a way the game's meant to be played, and that's what I want to play. I'm also pretty allergic to games that make extensive uses of mods for the same reason.