It could be the updates, bat's and such...
Back in the beta we could find tons of creative servers. Survival servers. I tried some of the alpha, then came back and played on 1.7.3 to now. I stopped for 6 months. And found all of these raiding, faction servers. There used to be a server I played on in 1.0.0
I forget what it's called but you could choose your race and class. Yes there was PVP, but only in a small arena. There were cooperative dungeons. Shops. No raiding, griefing. There were good plugins back then.