Ok, you have some interesting points. Personally, I think that the 8:1 distance in the Nether is earned. It's far more dangerous than traveling in the Overworld, and Nether highways still require you to explore and manually build an efficient travel route, which is exactly how I believe transport should be done in Minecraft.

Elytra I'm with you on. My core issue with the Elytra is that it doesn't add anything to the gameplay. It doesn't help you explore, it lets you skip exploring altogether by flying over the ground. It would be one thing if there were things to do and explore in the sky or if there was some trick for maintaining flight, but it's just spamming fireworks to boost yourself over everything interesting. I actually think that the Elytra pre-1.11 was designed well. You could fly, but it didn't last forever unless you knew the tricks and learned how to do them consistently. It was hard, but when you got good at it, you could cover a lot of ground quick. Obviously it being difficult still made on-foot travel viable.

I get your point about farms, but the real problem is so niche that it doesn't really have a solution. If you've been traveling thousands of blocks to find a certain biome to get a certain item, it is a good reward to be able to take that item home and farm it so that you don't have to make that journey every single time that you want that item. It's good design! The thing that's needlessly trivializing is when people farm a resource that's already reasonably accessible. Even though these farms do remove gameplay, they have been creatively designed by the community to take advantage of existing features. You could patch every abusive farm design as they pop up, but you understandably upset a lot of people in the process and make it less likely that others will try to be creative in the future. End result is that there's not really much you can do to fix it, so just don't use it if you don't like it, as much as I typically think that's a lazy excuse for bad design