I don't think Minetest has much of a chance, it always felt like a loose group of programmers making a game engine rather than game designers creating a game. At least when I last tried it, it was completely devoid of any features to improve the game feel, everything (movement, camera movement, animations, mining, etc) just felt like a soulless "technically correct" implementation that a programmer without artistic vision would come up with.
It's the typical open source model. They are probably hoping someone else comes in to add the gameplay via modding.