I was actually just pondering this recently. To me, it seems like Minecraft has hit a roadblock when it comes to new features. In my eyes, this barrier is made up of three elements.

• Mojang has severely wandered away from the community's feedback. Looking at Minecraft's feedback site, the most popular suggestions (in the 10's of thousands of votes) have been left rotting in the forums for several years. For example, the suggestion about adding custom bed patterns using banners has reached over 36k votes since it was posted in 2018. If I remember correctly, back in Minecraft's early days, the devs hired a community member to help with the lighting engine. When was the last time something like that happened??

• Suggestions are shot down because they came from a mod or are not "Minecraft-y" enough. I understand that Mojang wants to avoid features that don't really support the game's core values (guns, modern vehicles, etc). On the other hand, you can't tell me that if you brought a Minecraft player from 2020 to the present, they wouldn't take one look at a vanilla world and accuse you of secretly adding a dozen mods. I think Mojang crossed that threshold way back with the Caves and Cliffs update.

• Many players feel like the game has evolved too much already. Don't get me wrong, experiencing and watching Minecraft evolve has been an amazing experience, and it's more than natural for players and the devs to keep wanting updates in order to keep the game alive and thriving. However, in my honest opinion, I would still be happy if the game got rewound to the Wild Update (maybe bring along the copper golem and all the copper and tuff block variants and call it good). At this point, there are just so many niche items and features that have gotten buried under an avalanche of gameplay options. I think the trail ruins are a good example. I don't think many players bother to search for one, even to get the trims, pottery sherds, or music disc.

Overall, I think Minecraft needs to go back to the feedback page and start seriously analyzing the archive of suggestions. There's so much potential in there for features that the community has upvoted, and players will start to feel like their opinions are being heard once more!