I loved it when hoppers were introduced into the game because I love the automation of the game right now. With the villager, golem, and pigmen nerfs, tons of automation has been taken away from Minecraft. What sucks about this is that I feel that Mojang is trying to force us to play the game in a certain way even though we could have chosen to play that way in any earlier version of the game. Removing the possibility to create farms and removing the possibility to automate tedious processes is going to be bad for the game because it starts to take all the possibility away from a sandbox. If we are playing a sandbox game, why aren't we allowed to make what we want?

Without redstone and automation, increasing your power and resources runs out real fast. You go from fists to wooden tools to stone tools in a matter of a minute. Your first iron ingots could happen in the first 10 minutes, and you can have a full set of iron tools and armor inside of an hour if you want. Wheat, livestock, and a full set of agricultural stuff can happen inside of another hour. Diamonds might take a little longer, but you can have basic diamond tools, some nice enchanted stuff, and a potion brewing set-up in an afternoon.
And then, what? At that point, there's not much more forward progress to make. Sure you can spend a lot of time grinding wither skeletons to get enough skulls for the wither (and it is a major, major grind, not really interesting or fun). You can find a stronghold and go kill the dragon. And then what do you do with yourself? Make some cool houses or castles, explore. But if you want to feel like you're continuing to gain power, to become the master of your realm, to reshape the world and bend the landscape to suit your needs, there's not much else to do.
This is where I think the automation and various farms come in. They make it possible to have more satisfying goals, more of a sense of ongoing progress. It takes time, work, intelligence, a keen understanding of the way the game works, and often a considerable amount of travelling and exploring for the necessary components (villagers, cats, large quantities of obsidian, etc) in order to make really epic machines like high-output gold farms, iron farms, mob-sorters to make auto-breaking farms with creepers, music disc farms, let alone something like an obsidian farm utilizing a wither. There's an element of excitement and danger in a lot of these things, which can go hideously wrong in hilarious fashion with the slightest miscalculation. They expand the concept of crafting beyond a 3X3 grid into a whole, rich world of redstone and mob-pathing logic and spawning rules, and allow the player to make rich, complex, dynamic, functional, and ultimately profitable creations. To me, this is the real game of Minecraft. Digging a bunch of tunnels underground to find some diamonds is a fairly boring chore I do to allow me to play the real, rich, satisfying game that is making large complex functional structures. Lighting up caves and digging the iron out of the walls is reasonably entertaining for an hour or so, but it gets real old real fast, but it gets me started and outfitted until I can make an iron farm. Building a nice, aesthetic house or a picturesque farm or a seemingly defensible castle is all well and good, but building a structure that does something, that accomplishes some goal and help fulfill my needs it really awesome.
It's frustrating to feel like Mojang looks down on pretty much all of the aspects of the game that I most love, and that they're hell bent on making the game smaller, poorer, and less interesting.

Exactly. One of my favorite aspects of MC is that you can go from being a hunter/gatherer to a farmer, and eventually to a titan of industry. Means of production such as iron/gold farms provide the resources necessary to create an proper civilization.
There's something really magical about going from punching trees to building entire cities filled with skyscrapers in vanilla MC (albeit it can take literally hundreds of hours to reach that type of end game).

What's so "end gamey" about them? An iron farm just requires a village, and gold farms require a redstone-to-obsidian converter. They can be made well before fighting the Enderdragon, let alone finding a stronghold, and whether they make said farms or not, a player should ALWAYS be encouraged to play however they want in any genre of game, otherwise, without the element of choice and interaction, you might as well be watching someone else play it.
I think we really just need a good, clear and detailed idea of the game design philosophy behind Minecraft that Mojang can promise to adhere to. Nothing that applies to creative; I view creative mode as a sort of debugging and "do whatever" kind of deal. I'm just saying, obviously we want to survive in Survival mode. But is there any point to limiting the means by which we survive?
EDIT: Sick of people misinterpreting my definition of "endgame". The Endgame is where you're near the END of the GAME, as in right about to get to the credits, or any other goal that, once achieved, means that you've overcome what the developer intended as the biggest challenge to the protagonist. The Ender Dragon might be easy for people that know what they're doing, but it was CLEARLY INTENDED to be difficult to the casual player.