Use a Pylon (which you wrote to sound incredibly over-complicated when it takes 2 seconds)
Does it?
If you have 8 Pylons in the world, figuring out which one the Dryad is at takes more than 2 seconds. You have to search through the map (which may be rather big), looking at every Pylon location until you find her.
it honestly sounds like it'll take a shorter overall time using Pylons because you dont have to maneuver through your base and NPC prison to get to an NPC in the far corner of the top of the prison.
I don't know what you mean by "NPC prison", but
my bases are designed for easy navigation from room to room.
Also, the new depth is MUCH more interesting than what it was before. Before NPCs had no personality to them, and now they do. Is it so unrealistic for a character to have preferences? Would you enjoy it if you were a nature lover stuck in a tiny wooden box crammed into a huge NPC prison system nowhere near any interesting nature? Now they have personalities and preferences like any normal person would have, and letting them enjoy their preferences makes them enjoy you as a person and give you rewards.
When I said that this mechanic had no "depth", I was referring to the
gameplay depth, the mechanical complexity of the actions the player takes and the variety of choices the player has. I don't care if this mechanic allows an NPC's personality to be imposed on the gameplay. What I care about is how that imposition affects the gameplay.
From a gameplay perspective, this mechanic is exceedingly shallow. Every NPC has one or more preferred biomes. They have one or more un-preferred neighbor NPCs. And you can find out about any/all of these... by asking them.
This has all the complexity of a game of Go-Fish with all the cards face-up: just pair the ones who match. Problem solved.
So where's the depth?
Look at Stardew Valley. The game is, at it's core, about farming. There is absolutely NO requirement to go and make friends with the NPCs in the game, but if you make friends with them, they give you a lot of nice items and make progress easier to achieve. That game is a masterpiece and people LOVE the NPCs because they actually have depth and don't just unconditionally send you nice trinkets in the mail every day. It gives you a sense of accomplishment for making friends with them.
I've never played this game. However, I imagine that, from a gameplay perspective, "making friends" with them requires more effort than just asking them their preferences and moving them to that preferred location, right?
Because that's all Terraria is bringing with this change. There's no "sense of accomplishment" to be had for a task that is rather trivial.
Again, the feature does not require you to be good at building. You can get along with your NPC prisons, but the update itself was made for the purpose of giving incentive to build in new locations, which allows for more creativity and diversity in your builds. What's more diverse, one castle made of stone brick and wood, or a town of igloos in the snow biome, a western bar in the desert, a jungle treehouse in the jungle, a pirate ship in the ocean biome, a sky castle in the sky, and a mining quarry underground? Of course you don't HAVE to build those things, but the fact that I was able to just come up with nice build ideas is exactly my point. Without this update, I'd just keep throwing my NPCs into a wooden box with no thought or inspiration whatsoever, but now I can come up with creative houses for each of the NPCs that matches the biomes they live in.
For you, a specific game feature was able to inspire you to consider what might be an interesting home tailored to an NPC. That's great for you, and I mean that sincerely.
But do not mistake a source that managed to inspire you as being the
only possible source for similar inspiration for others.
There is nothing that prevented anyone from previously coming up with those ideas. In fact, I rather suspect many people have used these ideas to varying degrees previously. This feature is not
empowering you to do something you could not before; at best, it has inspired you personally. But that's just you, personally.
Creativity, or a lack thereof, is
not why people don't commonly build these things in their runs through Terraria. It's because, as I have stated before, NPCs are
game mechanics; they exist for the player to be able to use them. And the most convenient way to use them is if they are all right there next to each other.
If you play Terraria for long enough, and are trying to just experience the content of the game, NPCs are just a means to an end. So you spend the bare minimum of time on them that the game requires and you move on. And people will continue to do that in 1.4.
All 1.4 did was change what that bare minimum would look like. Instead of one set of boxes, you have several. But they'll still be cookie cutter, minimum effort boxes, because that's what it takes to get to what they feel are the good parts of the game.
Easy solution to this is have a bed near the dryad or particular npcs house,
You can only have one active spawn point. I picked the Dryad as an example because, by and large, you only
rarely need her services. If your bed will only be near a couple of NPCs, you won't pick the Dryad as one of them.
plus you'll eventually get used to the layout of your world anyway so no biggie.
I
can get used to a lot of things. You haven't explained why I should
have to get used to it. It's not improving my play experience. Or at least, not in a way that couldn't easily be achieved in another way.
To be honest, throughout the fifty+ runs I've made of the game, I never had an incentive to not just shove my NPCs into commieblock towers. If I have to suffer higher prices as a result, that seems like a good incentive to give them some room to breathe. It'll be more challenging, for sure, but I don't think we should discard it as bad right off the bat.
The question you're not asking is
why people build these so-called "commieblock towers" in the game. You seem to think of it purely as a stylistic choice. It's not.
It's a choice that favors player convenience. It allows me to see the greatest number of NPCs all at once, and to quickly and efficiently access them if I need to. They're
right there; I don't have to go looking for them, or activate a Pylon or whatever else.
It's just like when the devs nerfed various cheese strats against the moon lord. Sure it might've ruined some fun here and there, but it did improve the game overall. I even heard these same arguments used to blast the nerfs that were happening, talking about how it ruined their fun and how the devs were "forcing you to play a specific way". If it wasn't for that, the Moonlord would be trivial.
But that's kind of the point. See, the correct way to deal with cheese strategies against the Moon Lord is not to make the Moon Lord arbitrarily invulnerable to cheese strats. It's to
not put cheese strats into the game. I mean, Vampire Knives. That doesn't even rise to the level of a "strat"; it's just a weapon you pick up that turns the game into easy mode. If you put an easy-mode weapon in the game, it's silly to give the final boss a "you can't use the easy mode weapon against me" ability. It's a bait-and-switch: you teach the player to use easy-mode, then you take it away when they need it the most, forcing them to learn all the stuff they didn't learn when they were relying on easy-mode.
Your analogy is good, because this feature comes from the same kind of thinking. This mechanic feels very artificial, something bolted onto an existing system in order to
forceencourage players to play in a way that isn't necessarily how they would play otherwise. The devs don't like people making tight-knit homes for NPCs, so they hurt you if you play that way.