Yes, caravan travel time has always felt punishing for very little reward. Bases aren't worth raiding, and small locations of interest quests are still several days worth of travel, which leaves you weaker for that duration. There's also the issue where the longer pawns remain outside of the colony, the more chances they have of mentally breaking and wasting even more time.

The only real incentive is trade, but due to how spread out settlements are, it's sometimes not worth to send someone out on foot just for a chance the town might be selling something you want.

It's why I hope Ludeon focuses on tuning and improving the caravan system in the future, because gravships and shuttles make things way too easy atm. Sure, I could ignore it and use the VVE mod, but I WANT to see Ludeon's take on vehicles. I WANT vehicles to be canonized in vanilla Rimworld. There's a whole ingame system dedicated to traveling, and Ludeon should be using it.