When I play MC it either has to be with an explicit creative building goal or a hands-held progress-through-this-tech-modpack (I still fool around with GT:NH regularly).

I've also accepted that maybe my interests are just not the target market for the survival genre and there's something there that I'm never going to "get."

Oh, preach comrade, I completely agree!

I also think the pokemon aesthetics are enough to take a generally non-mainstream genre (survival-crafting) and blast it to a broader audience.

I wouldn't say this genre is not mainstream. These types of survival games always explode in popularity, gets featured incessantly on twitch and afterwards it usually retains quite a chunky commited playerbase. But I completely agree with the rest of what you wrote.