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I had a similar experience to the author, using XNA during undergrad to explore building a 3D game engine (though mine was not voxel-based). Much like him I spent a ton of time developing the terrain rendering - generating heightmaps with Perlin noise, stitching them together, texturing, chunking, frustum culling, etc. I fondly remember reading and re-reading papers on things like Chunked LOD and atmospheric scattering, and having those breakthrough moments when, holy shit, the scene actually rendered correctly, and when I move around the terrain seamlessly switches between levels of detail...

Point is, the XNA tools and community were the base that motivated and enabled all of that, and I too am disappointed that it died an awkward and unceremonious death.

It's not dead yet, still games being developed on it

It is a shame. Monogame seems to be moving to replace it, but it's not quite there yet. I wonder if MS has anything under wraps for Windows 10.

More than Unity?

More than Flash, Steam, or mobile app stores?

Unity3d caught the wave that XNA started.