There has been severe refactors going on ever since 1.2 or so. Whether they are beneficial or not is still a large debate between modders, but from a stability and customizability perspective they most likely are.

What bugs are you talking about? I've played on and off from 1.2ish, both online and standalone. It's still an unoptimised mess but it's not too bad.

Here's one:

https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MC-51053

Basically they tried to make some improvements to carts in general, fucked that up, then "reverted" that change and since then powered carts don't work. There's even a fix posted a year ago on the damn ticket itself - but apparently they are too busy adding attention-grabbing bullshit to even do a simple copy / paste job in order to fix major flaws in the game.

You'd think, in a game called "Minecraft", that minecarts would get more attention. Alas...

However, now that I've looked at this again, it appears they are finally planning to do something about this problem, where "something" is just removing powered carts altogether: https://twitter.com/jeb_/status/699241247391772672

And don't get me started on boats - though they did eventually fix that after a few years.

Right... Thanks for that. That's very disappointing. Still, there might be a remote chance that Minecraft is eventually open sourced. This is New Microsoft after all.