.  For a while, Minecraft maps were the coolest shit. I can't express how facinating they were to me. The amount of work was palpable, the limited features we had made technical aspect of some of them look like magic and the chear ton of diversity was amazing. When I wanted to play Minecraft, I regularly went and searched for maps to play instead of playing basic survival mode. After finishing them, I would always end up with so many ideas, a curiosity of how things worked and I would spend a signifcant amount of time in a test world messing around with command blocks using the stuff I learned and created new things. In fact it was probably what I spent the most time on. I wanted to make maps !
  Maps were a massive part of the Minecraft community, they represented a significative part of Youtube content, something we do not seem to see as much anymore. There were people playing them, people creating them and people making mapmaking videos and tutorials. It was big!

  Alright, let's make things clear : maps still exist, people are still making them and people are still playing them and making videos about it. They are of similar quality and probably technically better. But haven't they lost in popularity ? I heard a mapmaker express the same feeling. Also, all the opinions and analyses in this blog post are a bit exagerated for the sake of clarity. Too much nuances would get hard to clearly express and could lose the specific feeling I'm trying to put down on paper.
  Getting back to maps, I have two main hypotheses for why they are not as popular as before (if they even are).
  The first one is a renewed interested for vanilla survival Minecraft. It is at the same time a good thing, as people are enjoying the game for what is was originally meant to be and it seems to be a proof that the game is getting better, and a sad thing because other ways of playing are being left down.
  The second one, as the title of this post may suggests, is datapacks. If my profile page is to be believed, I am a datapacker myself. So what do I have againts them?
  Well, when datapacks were introduced, it felt like magic to people. It was difficult for people to understand how they worked. You just drag this in your world folder and now you can put carpets on stairs? What?! And then people just accepted it. It was a thing you could do now I guess. No need to understand how it works, it just does. Things just got from spectacle magic to fantasy magic. With spectacle magic, you know there is a trick, and that if you look closely you can figure out how it works and maybe try it yourself. With fantasy magic however, you just accept magic. It's just how this world works. The dematerialised nature of datapack made them inaccessible and turned physical command block into lines of code.
  Let's compare it to an old trend from... *checks the date* seven years ago?!!!?! What ?! Is it this old?! *clears throat* Let's compare it to an old trend from seven years ago : One Command Creations. Wasn't that rad? Even simpler than a datapack. Copy and paste it in a command block and you have a structure of command blocks making crazy shit automatically. It could have suffered of the same problems as datapacks but in my opinion, the physicality of it saved it. Were you have lines of code nowadays, making it feel like a mod, you had a monument, there, responsible for all the magic happening and if you wanted to check out the commands, it was very easy to do so.
  But why do I think datapacks replaced maps? Well, why go on this map with a cool gimick when you can have the gimick in a regular world? Why play an adventure map when you have an adventure datapack? Wanna play a minigame? Why not use a datapack to play this minigame? Of course you can go play on maps to try these things in a controlled and beautiful setting but you probably won't.
  Maybe Mojang is killing mapmaking by giving all the tools we need.

  If my PMC profile is to be believed, I am a datapacker myself, and if you didn't know me before you might be surprised by that. And do you want to know something? I do not play with datapacks. Not even my own! I know right? I sometimes come to Planet Minecraft to check out on new datapacks, give them a diamond or follow them but I actually never play with them or even download them. I'm only interested on the technical aspect and if anything seems inovative to me or look like a ton of effort went into it, I feel like I have to let the creator know.
  Nowadays I only play vanilla survival Minecraft with an occasional trip to my creative test world to develop redstone ideas. I barely spend any time at all developping datapck anymore because it feels uncreative, too easy but at the same time too grindy.
  Will I continue to make datapack and update the one I already published? Frankly, I have no clue. Does it mean I won't post any new project to PMC? It is possible but I still don't know. I'm actually starting to think about this as I write.

  That's pretty much it for me. Sorry if it was a bit dense to read. I'm curious to see if you have anything to say about it. Don't hesitate to tell me if you think I'm wrong, I think there is some good conversation to be had. Anyway, have a good day :)