Rebalance Transportation and Movement

I remember when I first played Minecraft that transportation and movement throughout the world was challenging; Your boat would break at the slightest bump, you had to walk everywhere, and while minecarts were objectively the best form of transport, rails were expensive. I've experienced the addition of hunger and sprinting, horses and llamas, and eventually the elytra; each new form better than the last and essentially making all previous forms obsolete. Frankly, this needs to be fixed for these forms of transportation in the same way boats were improved to have better articulation/movement and no longer break into sticks at the slightest bump.

Minecarts: these should be used to get around your world between known / frequent locations. My suggestion is to make them faster and more affordable. I think the ideal way to do this is by increasing the base Minecart speed by 1.5 (12 m/s) so that on regular tracks they go the same speed as on the current "diagonal" rails. Then add in copper rails with a base speed of 2 (16 m/s), but over time they oxidize and decrease to the current base of 8 m/s. Since Copper is more prolific in the world this fixes the affordability issue as well, though a simple increase of the rail recipe from 16 to 24 for iron and from 6 to 16 for gold/powered would also help. Perhaps Iron rails also maintain momentum more than copper, to balance speed with more powered rails vs momentum with less. 

Horses: horses are fantastic for exploring the unknown and traveling around your world. The stat variations for speed, jumping, and health are also implemented well. The primary issue is their mobility through the world, horses get stuck on tree leaves and cannot cross deep water. I think a simple solution for the latter is easily fixed by allowing horses to enter boats, for the former having the horse/player go through leaves similar to water or lava, you'd be slowed down by leaves being in your face but not stopped entirely and forced to break the leaves. Another idea is to add a new stamina stat for horses; instead of the jump bar being used to plan the perfect jump, it can be changed to a stamina bar for the horse to encourage players to eventually stop and explore or camp somewhere for a short period to let their horse's stamina to recharge. Then stamina, just like health, speed, and jumping, could be increased with breeding, though instead of making this a grind and game of chance modify horse breeding to have a slight increase based on the golden food used (golden carrots for jumping, glistering melons for speed, golden apples for health, etc). 

Sprinting: sprinting could use a nerf, as it stands you can sprint endlessly as long as your hunger bar is full, meaning its easy to run from monsters, easier to explore than with horses, and easier to get around your world than on minecarts. I think 8 m/s is fine for sprinting, but to encourage walking the player should have a stamina bar over the hunger bar. If stamina is full the player can either quickly heal or sprint, otherwise if it is empty the healing is slower and the player is forced to walk and let their stamina recharge. To instead encourage hunger/eating though, stamina can only recharge to the current state of hunger; if you have full hunger then you can have full stamina, though if your hunger is depleted then so is the amount of full stamina (4 hunger bars = 4 full stamina bars). The trade-off is that walking and fighting monsters doesn't deplete stamina, only jumping, sprinting, and critical hits. 

Elytra: I liked the elytra nerf that was implemented, seemed like a good trade-off to have the elytra take damage from rocket boosts but not gliding. I also liked that the rocket boost itself was decreased, I thought it was a good way to make this form of transportation balanced with the rest. I'd love to see this nerf from the 1.18 experimental snapshot 7 come back, but with a caveat. A lot of complaints were from people regarding the decreased speed, I think a good trade-off is to introduce a faster / more powerful rocket to the game, but that is more expensive through the requirement of dragon's breath. It would add a viable reason to collect and use dragon's breath in Minecraft while nerfing the speed of regular rockets. This way players can still wiz through the air and super-sonic speeds if they choose to, but it'll cost them a little more than just 3 gunpowder. Maybe dragon's breath increases the blast radius/size of the firework explosion along with the speed of the rocket?

I would love these changes to all come to Minecraft, though I understand they may be rebuked/receive backlash. My point is that we need a major overhaul to transportation though, Minecarts need a buff, Elytra need a nerf or some sort of rebalance, and horses need a reason to be used more for exploration as well.