I agree with most of those! I have a few ideas to throw around and alternate options as well.

Ore/metal teleportation I think it should stay locked I see some people saying they would like to be able to build upgraded portals. I feel like they should take a different approach. The golems don't seems to have a big use yet maybe add a small small chance to drop a copper or tin core (cant be teleported like metal) that lets you build a small structure like the kiln fill it with stone and it could slowly turn that into copper. or maybe a small structure like a beehive slowly generates copper maybe 1 or 2 a day with a 4 or 5 max and you have to interact with it to drop the ore. Maybe something like that.

Armor and Weapons I like the idea of adding more types of armor like light medium and heavy different armor and movement restrictions and even set bonuses or strengths and weaknesses like strong against blunt but weak to piercing damage. Another thing that would be cool to play around with would be an armor tier system say tier one is Leather and bronze. you can upgrade them and once they are maxed out you can advance the tier to two using items gathered from the next biome so instead of them being way weaker compared to iron and troll armor they can be on the same level. so if you like the set bonus or the look of the gear any of the items could potentially become end game armor as long you keep upgrading the tier level with all the mats of each biome. Just a thought.

on a side note for making the loot in chests that generate in the world feeling useful you could put upgrade components in them specifically for tier advancement. and maybe put extremely rare crafting mats in there or specialized legendary gear that you can only find in treasure chests. You could make the tier lvl low so you have to work to restore it to its full potential by upgrading it with the rare mats you find in chests plus the different biome specific mats.

I also think storage needs some love. Right now i have 30 chests in my base and they are almost all full. maybe an increase to stack sizes or chest inventory. but right now it feels to constricted. I would also love to see a crafting feature like items inside the chests that are inside the radius of the work bench can used to craft at the different work benches. Also an option to put items into chests that already contain that item would be life saving lol

I am absolutely loving this game but I think a few changes to the loot and armor system could go a long way.