To what end are we arguing? Game balance? It's hard to argue game balance when I can get a bunch of beacons together and Eff 5 picks, and clear whole chunks out in a less than a minute. If somebody were so inclined, they could mine the whole mesa in a few weeks. A town of people could take it to bedrock and clear out all of the gold. The problem with terrain generated anything is that once it's mined, it's gone. There's no renewable resources on a size-limited map. Take, for example, horse armor. We can't craft it; it only exists as pre-generated loot in chests. Since there is a finite number of chests, there's a finite number of horse armors, and if somebody collects all of them and tosses them into a lava pool, the rev has no more horse armor period.
This is an argument over nothing. There's several mechanics that limit resources, and this is just a way to gather those same limited resources without having to resort to hoping to find an unmined chunk for hours of mindless mining.
As a matter of balance, though, Totemo, I think we might want to follow suit with what Mojang is doing in 1.11 and severely limit the generation of resources from smelting - I had said one ingot as an output in game chat, only because it will become a very broken manner of obtaining iron. To address my feelings towards buzzie's concerns: There's a finite amount of things we can do in the game world within the confines of the server's real-world hardware. If we had a purely vanilla server with only mob-grief turned off, every town would already have hundreds of iron golem spawning pads and thousands upon thousands of villagers. To limit that, we went to the spawners, but that really wasn't a solution because we're all just too good at Minecraft. Look at how broken auto-farming has to be, because if not, we would all be swimming be bedrock to skyheight in emeralds. The spawners were limited to publicly extend the tech tree, but I'm sure there's been some difficult to quantify load taken off of the server because of that limiting.
Ultimately, we are severely unbalanced in the middle of the tech tree, but it's still very simple to get to the endgame without much hindrance. A player can find the 16 necessary diamonds to make the armor they can't buy, buy the enchants necessary to have endgame gear, and then spend a trivial amount of time farming materials to farm the friggin' dragon if they were so inclined. What's been affected most is rail infrastructure, which is why I was confused in the first place why we were limiting iron since it's such a necessary resource for connecting cities.