My two youngest kids (10 and 12) love minecraft. And they love minetest too. They just see minetest as a slightly different version of minecraft.
They don’t view minetest as inferior. Just different!
When the Minecraft alphas and betas first came out, they took the internet by storm.
Soon after that, a few minecraft clones popped up. And the most notable was minetest. Most notable because it was completely open source. It was actually playable. And also because it wasn’t Java based, so it ran much more smoothly than minecraft did on lower spec hardware.
No weird glitches, freezes or crashes when creating excessively large explosions with tnt, for example.
Another thing about minetest is - minetest itself is just a game engine.
Minetest-game is the minecraft style survival game that comes by default with minetest.
But there are a lot of other games/mini-games that run on minetest. AFAIK - They all feature the minecraft-style blocky graphics, but they don’t necessarily rely on the mining/crafting/foraging mechanics used in Minecraft.
There’s a list of minetest games/mini games here:
wiki.minetest.net
And there are a decent number of mods, which provide extra mobs, objects, materials etc. too.
But minetest is an open source project, still actively developed and maintained by a small team of volunteers. They aren’t making money from the project, so they can’t afford to be working full-time on minetest. And so the pace of development is going to be a lot slower.
I haven’t seen minetest for a couple of years now, so I haven’t seen any recent changes. But personally, I think the only thing minetest is really missing is a little bit of polish. Particularly the default minetest-game, could do with a few extra details to make the game a little more immersive.
Simple things like background music, background sound effects. Just small touches that would make the game feel a bit more complete and a little more engaging for players.
Minetest has come a long way in the last 8 years. And I’m sure it will continue to improve for years to come!