The majority of people have never decompiled Minecraft to understand how naive and slow it was initially. Why does Scaevolus's awesome shader mod Optifine even exist? Because of Minecraft's poor performance -> poor code -> poor design. JahKob has claimed that this format is up to 7 times faster than the previous system. The McRegion format was adopted nearly unchanged, except for the addition of a table of chunk update timestamps. How did we end up with the new region file format? Because of Scaevolus's excellent chunk optimization, McRegion, which was blatantly used.
I've criticized Minecraft's facing direction clusertfuck in the past. Groupthink + an inconvenient truth is never popular.
