@Tripoli
Tracking corruption spread can be done in other ways too, and the surface often wouldn't tell much about it, until it's too late anyway. it might appears fine, but hidden under the ground it spreads, and then...
but you won't see that when running though there.
and if you quaranteened areas, then corruption spread is usually not a concern anymore.
Yeah, it would be nice if other areas would offer stuff too. but I think it's part intentional to have boring areas here and there, because they can be great places for the player to use for something. there was this boring forest far away for example, I used to create a surface hallow with a town too, because the original one spawned though the graveyard and artifical surface corruption, and I wanted to return them the way they were. that boring forest come in quite handy as a new hallow.
by the way, agriculture could be interesting, but it likely wouldn't solve issues with boring areas...
Of course people will use methods that are convinient.
I know that on modded too, I also tend to use all the equipments allowing for quick travel too. Theseus' Thread, Wormhole mirror, Wall-mounted magic mirrors... teleportation potions...
Now we also have ocean and hell teleporting conches on vanilla too. What can be even better than a hellevator? an item that will instantly teleports you there, right?
They are huge QoL things.
Because walking around is not always fun, and is very tedious.
It won't hurt the feeling of discovery, IMO, because you can't aquire or use most of these prior to discovering said areas first.
As for the happiness system debate, I didn't really joined that, because it's kind of a shark-filled water, as someone said.
I'm generally happy with the happiness system, and spread out NPCs. this is actually also makes them having more safety too, since it is usually the center base/town that gets wiped out at events. NPCs living far away are safe.
I really don't care much about prices changing though, you can usually get rich quite fast after you get past a few bosses. it doesn't matters if something costs +5 gold coins more, when you have 30-40 plat in your piggy bank...
and you have the pylons, which are absolutely amazing.
(I do wonder though how will this balance out with mods adding more NPCs, necessarily turning town more crowded. which I don't see as a problem, but would be better if NPCs mind crowding a bit less)
on a side note on quick travel, my game used to crash sometimes when entering new biomes. this was even more so when had overhaul mod eneabled what back then caused crash 90% of the times you entered a desert or the underworld. that's why I was very happy about ways to teleport, so I could get to locations easier that were beyond a desert or something, and, generally, it was very frustrating, when you spent 5-10 minutes walking to your jungle only that the game would crash when you arrived. if it crashed, it would do so with teleporter too, which means sparing that 5-10 minutes walking there only to have the game crash. the game often worked like "today (in-game day), this biome will cause crash. come back tomorrow" and so it was convient to teleport, to avoid wasting time on areas you couldn't go to anyway. or sometimes the crash would occure a bit later, so you could "teleport, set bed there to spawn. exit map. re-enter map. the biome won't cause crash now"
later some helped with that issue by suggesting changing some settings, and I disabled overhaul mod too.
But I have bad experiences with terraria crashes, so I'm happy you can teleport around.
Also, as for reforge, I do think if you know what you're doing, first time you most likely will clear stardust pillar first, then the pillar of your class, and leave the other two for later, and so you would have your weapons early in the event and reforge them if they need to be reforged before tackling the other pillars, and moon lord.
I agree that the moon lord summon item is crazy expensive. you wouldn't use it much to farm moon lord, because you just can't afford it. but the lunar events are hardly any fun when going through there the 5th or 10th time...
it would be good if the summon item would be at least cheaper...
As for teleporter hubs, I used to have one in the world of my first playthrough. it was really useful too. But on modded, with all sorts of other fast travel methods, I would rarely use teleporters. they are a pain to set up.
And in this map for first 1.4 playthough, the pillars' areas are pretty much equal to my jungle town, desert town, tax collector's house (it's not a town, there is no pylon there, the snow pylon I used underground there) and hallow town.
since the towers notoriously appear there, having the pylons so close would be extremely convinient, but no, they don't work.
and what I mean, yes, I could set up 1-1 teleporters to these towns, but there are the pylons already allowing for fast travel there. you don't need a teleporter there outside of the lunar events, when the pylons works well. if you would set up a teleporter, then why the pylons?
you still can set up teleporters to other areas, but I see no point of having both a pylon and a teleporter leading to the same area.
(naturally towers might appear far from towns on other maps, where teleporters to their areas makes sense.)
as for wings & mounts, it's not that they're not good. it's just that teleporting is faster. it might be just a minute to fly there, but if you get oneshot by a nebulla floater the moment you arrived, you have to fly there again. and again. and again. and traveling there so many times will be 1 minute x so many times. which can be quite some time wasted in total, you could save by being able to teleport there.
pylons can spoil players a lot, and suddenly when you can't use them, it's a big pain. especially when they could take you right next to a tower right away. we can argue this is bad. certainly you grown accustomed to having the pylons real quick, and take it for granted, only to find out they don't work at a time when you would really really need them.
We can come up with "lore" why they don't work, like the apocalypse just messed up the pylons. (it doesn't matters is NPCs are happy or not, the pylons only need to have NPCs nearby, it does not matters if they're not happy)
But that still doesn't changes the fact, that suddenly realising they don't work when the lunar apocalypse starts is a big pain.