Minecraft had good graphics, actually - the color pallet was clearly well thought-out, and the blocky low-poly aesthetic was chosen for visual consistency with

Minecraft had good graphics, actually - the color pallet was clearly well thought-out, and the blocky low-poly aesthetic was chosen for visual consistency with the 1m voxel size that makes up the entire world. Short of shipping with raytracing (which notably wasn't real-time possible in 2010), there's not much Notch could have done to improve the core graphics. (Note that while I'm using 'graphics' and 'aesthetics' interchangeably here, they're separate things with graphics meaning technological capability and aesthetics meaning artistic choices.)