Minecraft on the surface is generally an uninteresting game that gets boring really quick. The only reason you could get me to play vanilla is because of building considering how poor the survival machanics are. Thankfully there are a bunch of neat mods and modpacks that freshen the game up and makes it way more fun to play. Especially when you have friends around then it can be a blast. Hell I even had fun in a vanilla server because of how nice and friendly the server community was.
The community is mostly like every other game out there, it isn't great of course. The thing is that in Blockland you will randomly meet up with the community, in Minecraft you really won't since there isn't a central server list, you'll probably be playing with your friends most of the time. That said, I never had too much experience with the community itself. The forums are huge as hell, I never really utilizied them too much, but from my small experience people were pretty friendly.