Stop nerfing and severely inconveniencing players to encourage exploration

I am the owner of a small-ish Server that my friends and I play on (10 of us in total). We love building large structures and creating complex machines. However, most of us will be entering our 2nd year of university and we don't want to allocate all of our time to Minecraft.

This change will make it extremely difficult for us to enjoy this game when we decide to start over on a new world. We do not have the time or patience to explore for thousands of blocks just to get good gear so we can build. Even if we choose a specific seed and somehow manage, how on earth do you expect us to constantly replenish our armour and tools if anvils break all the time and how stupidly experience hungry they are in addition to the awful "Item Too Expensive!" mechanic. Not only that, but since now you want us to move villagers across thousands of blocks, tell me and everyone else here how you would do that, as the 2 ways that are acctually efficient and fast (Boats and rails are very expensive, either in resource or physical time.