I don’t want to tell you how to play your game, but I will say that diamond is well worth the effort, even if you don’t want to get it the easy way with villagers. The amount of time you will save using diamond will more than make up for the time spent mining, and make you resent all the time you’ve wasted using stone. Just dig a tunnel down to y -59 and strip mine, you never need to see a mob or get lost in a cave if you don’t want to. A normal level 30 enchant with efficiency 4 and unbreaking 3 will last a very long time, and can be repaired infinitely if you get mending on it.
I would compare it to something like drinking instant coffee all the time and finally tasting a properly brewed, high quality coffee. Or only buying cheap shoes all the time and then investing in a proper pair of very comfortable and well made ones. Or playing video games on a 5 year old hand me down Mac then upgrading to a decent gaming pc.
I also think a big part of it is how active users are counted. Saw in a different thread that it only counts accounts who have commented or posted in the last month. Well… I browse and vote on probably an average of 30-50 posts and many of their comments every single day, but the last comment I left was over a month ago.
I also wonder if the active user count is counting people who made multiple accounts across different instances and was therefore always massively overinflated to begin with. I have 5 lemmy accounts - one on lemmy.world when I first joined, one on lemmynsfw for happy fun times, and 3 more trying to find a different instance with the de federation policy and hoster that I wanted after lemmy.world was going through their ddos downtime issue.