A much bigger deterrent for those tends to be just the sheer amount of work needed for that to happen, mc is a large game and upturning its foundations demands a lot of time and energy
S
sunsette
There’s an alternate reality where I did it to Minecraft instead of melee 👀
A
AzzyypaarasTeam
There have been quite a few of them, and I don't mean just minor things like changing the brewing system and the like, I am speaking of partially or entirely using mc as a game engine for your shenanigans
To name some of the top of my head you have:
Better Than Wolves, the original total conversion mod that completely revamped mc's survival mode to be much more complex and punishing.
Terrafirmacraft, the above mod but on steroids, it pretty much switched things to be a semi-realistic prehistoric survival game, with knapping, forging, farming taking ages, and a shitton of changes, this is one of hte few cases where a mod is so large and expansive that most mods are outright incompatible with it.
Gregtech, the famous, this mod actually started as an addon for a tech mod called IndustrialCraft 2 (IC2), expanding upon its endgame, it slowly expanded over its iterations until it became a total conversion realistic tech mod, eventually splitting off completely from IC2 ~the fourth iteration, currently we are at gregtech 6, the last one as the dev has decided to focus his time on making the mod into its own game.
DivineRPG / Advent of Ascencion, less invasive than most others in this list, and I don't know much about it, but this is a gargantuan set of dimension / adventure mods with a lot of RPG mechanics, at its biggest it added like, 13 dimensions? All with ores, bosses, unique terrain, etc.
Hell, I would even call them sort of generational, you get like, one or two per "generation" of modders and they often keep being actively developed for a very long time, gregtech for example started in 1.3.2 and only recently finished being its life, having been active for a good 8 years
Better than wolves? bit of an oddball, it stopped updating to new mc versions on 1.5.2 since the dev said that dealing with the new stuff mojang added that did not fit the mod was omre trouble than it was worth, (+ the dev had beef with the forge guys over allegedly stolen code), but it kept being updated all the way til earlier this year, wherein the dev open sourced the mod and peaced out.