I agree with the first half of what you said, but for people considering MineClone2, be aware that it doesn't have the same mod support as the base game, and so modifying it doesn't always work well. It also adds some of Minecraft's limitations that were otherwise missing in Minetest, such as a more restrictive height limit in both directions. You can normally dig much much deeper and climb much higher in Minetest than Minecraft, and I think this is one of the cooler parts of Minetest.

MineClone2 is fun if you know Minecraft and you want something ready to play immediately, but if you have a background of playing modded Minecraft, don't expect to be able to take all the cool Minetest mods and slap them over MineClone2. This means you're playing a clone of vanilla Minecraft. For many this isn't very fun anymore. You'll probably want to start from scratch and build on top of the default minetest_game to enjoy all the cool mods out there, such as df_caverns.

I tried that recently but I found the landscape generation to be really poor. I tried all the various generators, to no avail.

It's been a while since I played Minecraft but I can't recall the maps being that poorly constructed.

It really distracted me from the game, to the point I stopped after just a few hours.

Rest was pretty good tho, so a shame.

i found a server with a nice community, which is what keeps me playing. but to start my own world i'd wish for better map generators. more realistic mountains, rivers, climates, etc.

and maybe some powerful tools would be nice, to efficiently build streets or dig new rivers, grow mountains, ... so you can efficiently create a map by hand, or modify a map to add or remove features.

fortunately, new map generators are being worked on, so there is hope for the future.

I play Minetest 2 with my kids and we have a great time.