There’s always a trade-off in large scale design between practicality and freedom, it’d be great if you could have endless numbers of block types completely customisable in any way… unfortunately that just isn’t practical (the disk space requirements for any encoding of such a world and performance requirements because of having such a slack description would be too great).
The same thing applies to having endless numbers of textures for given blocks. In Oort we already have many blocks that have more than a single texture (stone has 5), on-top of which there is not a single texture, but a colour map, a normal map, a specular map, an emissive map, but ultimately we’re limited by hardware (forgetting art resources) to how many textures the game can reasonably use before performance would be too bad even on the latest gpu’s.
That’s not to say we’re at that limit, but I don’t feel Oort really needs to have as many block ‘types’ as other voxel games do, because we also have the block colouring which means for a single stone block type there are hundreds of different colours of that stone block that can all be mixed together in a single world.