Aren'
You can still hold them in your offhand.
If you want to place blocks, just use a slot for it. I've never used the offhand for block placing, or anything to be honest. I really don't see this as the end of the world.
Alright: The enchantments are created and designed for survival. All enchantments available are useful to people in survival for its own purpose, and the curses are there to give enchanting a bit of a "risk" with them if you find a really good armor piece/book. I don't know why you're bringing this up here as if it's something to not update for, since the sweeping edge enchantment can literally not be used in the server and still be fine. I don't even know why you would't want to see this enchantment in the first place: Vanilla Minecraft has nothing like this currently, so what's the problem?
Why are prison servers mentioned in the first place? What do their plug-ins have to do with this thread? Why does their lack of varied enchantments have to do with 1.14 exactly?
Frostwalker and Depth Strider are "objectively" the same?
Dude, the only thing they have in common is them being water based.
Keep in mind that this is intended for vanilla: Using Frostwalker to move over water is completely up to you, but could also be replaced with a boat or something.
Depth striders are good for moving through water, in case you want to explore an ocean monument or something alike.
Keep in mind that you can't put both enchantments on the same boots under normal circumstances: Mojang knows the properties clash with each other.
Now: Enchantments like Bane of Arthropods, Smite, and Sharpness, like I said earlier, are good for their own uses. The usual person would pick Sharpness as it effects all the mobs, but the specific enchantments give a bigger damage boost on their respective mobs.
Smite is a pretty useful one against the Wither & wither skeletons in particular.
The underwater enchantments are, again, good in their own way. Aqua affinity allows you to dig faster underwater, and Respiration makes your breath last longer underwater. I feel like you've never even bothered to check what these enchantments actually do, let alone use them in survival like they're designed to.
Thousands, if not, tens of thousands of people love it.
Here's the perfect meme to reply to this:
In case you're wondering: From the teaser provided during Minecon & some tweets, the Trident appears to be either as fast as an axe, or slightly faster than axes. They're definitely slower than swords though.
The thing that makes the trident special however, is that it's a projectile that works well underwater AND it can be used to take off with your elytra into the sky with a special enchantment if it's raining (mentioned by Dinnerbone at one point). This is also really useful for survival, and definitely has good potential in possible minigames.
There's also a few more enchantments for the Trident that could make it even better than it already is, but for now it's just the returning enchantment (trident comes back when thrown) and the one mentioned above.
Again: I don't see why you hate this. Do you hate this just to hate it and have it as a reason to not update to 1.14 for your offhand blocks? 'Cause that's the only thing that's mentioned that can't be avoided by not using that feature.
Updating -> more content & less bugs (they fixed supposedly fixed block glitching, which also really helps our anti-cheat) -> more possible gamemodes -> unique games & experience -> more players play -> boom profit.
There's no harm in updating other than the offhand blocking thing you mentioned, and may I remind you, is a completely unnecessary thing to play with in the first place. I've played without using the offhand since 1.9 came out & never run into any inconveniences, so you can do it too.
Agree with everything stated above. Aside from the offhand thing, i personally found it to be quite usefull, especially being able to have blocks in your offhand, made building in certain cases a bit more fast and fluid. But then again, i can't deny the fact that it is indeed not a necessity. Still would be shame to have it removed though. Would definitely prefer it if they would update everything but not the off-hand changes, which, btw, in hindsight, i don't even think they were even going to change anything with in 1.14. Pretty sure Jeb decided to keep all the functions of it due to the negative playerfeedback that change received, but don't quote me on that. Will check in a sec if that's actually true.
Edit: here a source that kinda confirms my statement about the off-hand changes:
