I think the biggest difference here is that Notch is a man of his time. If you had to talk about a big developer acting like Notch, that would be Valve. They both are open to the community, meaning constant feedback in both ways (look at the last lighting engine used in Minecraft).
One the other hand you have Scawen and co. which act like Nintendo: This is our product, which is great, and the community builds a lot upon this great product, but without any aid from the developer. All the way around, in fact. You have this six years old game that still costs 30€. It's a great game, but you cannot pretend to sell an unfinished product for 30€ like it's new. Until you're Nintendo or Scawen & co.
If they were more clever, they would drop the price, embrace the community and release modding tools. Maybe not to add tracks, maybe not to add new cars. But maybe to allow people create a good AI, or built a good 1 player game where there's a barren land. Or maybe update the ugly graphics. It would be a much more interesting project then, because the only interesting thing coming from LFS in the latest years has come from the community alone.
So, the big difference is that Nothc is clever enough to realise it's not 2005 anymore and people expect something different, more open, now. Specially from indie devs.