Making Ancient Cities more Important by relating to End Portals

About the new ancient cities, although there is great loot, most of the OP gear can be found in End Cities, which you can access more easily than ancient cities themselves if you speedrun. 

Plus, I do appreciate the echo shards and swift sneak, but there isn’t a necessary purpose for them right now especially for experienced players. You can literally run from shrieking shriekers or sneak around the warden in a circular fashion, making Swift Sneak less important. And hardcore players do not need the recovery compass.

I suggest that the strongholds can be revamped, along with the introduction of broken end portal frames. To fill in an eye, the portal frame themselves should be fixed. And to fix, it requires some item from ancient city (e.g. portal repairer). This changes the very Core timeline of how you should play Minecraft which has been the same for years. (i.e. chop wood, get stone, get iron, go to nether, get blaze rods, get pearls, find strongholds, and kill Dragon - it has been the same for 10 years)