I'm too lazy to find the post (it was in Reinhart's translations, as well as a recent dev post) that hinted at some kind of chocobo minigame in the future. I forget the tentative name it had, but if you search some posts I'm sure you'll find it. They are probably giving us chocobos in 1.19 because they realized we NEED mounts, and we kinda need them now. They still have plans for more, though.