Well minetest_game is not actively developed, so nothing will change there. I think people had become content to use minetest_game, let the official devs build their game, and attach a few mods here and there. It seems the freezing of minetest_game has spurred people on to build other games. There is discussion to include some of these games in the official release. A few games to look at for different game play are:
Carbone
Wasteland
Adventuretest
BFD (Big Freaking Dig or something like that)
Lord of the Test
Minetest NeXt
Realtest
There are lots of games in the games forum
viewforum.php?f=15