DataFixerUpper looks more sophisticated on the surface, but it's egregiously overengineered, and tools accomplishing the same stated purpose could be made by a freshman with a couple of weekends to spare. It's also not particularly relevant to Minecraft, it's more of a general tool - so anyone hoping to learn about Minecraft from this will really learn more about Minecraft's annoying legacy baggage.
I think you underestimate how many weekends it would take a freshman - when I first took a CS course, I spent a solid few weekends working out array syntax, strchr and strncat, and how to best google compiler error messages. I was pretty proud of the text-based 2-player chess game for which I put in some late nights for my final project...a Minecraft renderer would have been a long way out.
This isn't a Minecraft renderer I'm talking about. The Minecraft renderer would be the non-trivial project I said "might end up being pretty cool" if they open source it.
When I went to university it was back in 94, and then people who took CS courses were pretty much self-taught programs already.
Sure "theory-stuff" was often new, because of the self-taught nature of the under-graduates. (I knew what a stack was because I'd done assembly-language coding, but I had no name for something I'd "created" which was a linked-list. Funny story.)
I assume nowadays with the internet people who want to code, can start early if they wish. Even if the lure of the outdoors is strong, and time is short.
With that in mind I'd assume any first-year student could write a system for updating data-files according to simple rules, (i.e. datafixerupper), and manage a simple parsing-class of some kind which would let you tokenize and react to "/send foo bar" input.
