A few of these I have no issues with. Traveling I personally enjoy, though I do wish mounts were created, though I'd actually prefer it if they weren't player owned. I don't want to be riding up to mobs to attack. I'd rather just take my mount to a favorite grinding spot, get off, tell it to wait for me, kill what I can, whistle, mount up again, and ride off, eventually stabling the mount at another camp or city.

I'd prefer the gathering mini-games over a simply click and wait like in WoW, though they should be smoothed, and perhaps the formulas more complex.

That said, they may already be, I just have very few ways of proving it. I'm not sure if it was just in my head, but I could often get up to 4 out of 5 mining strikes as one shots based on intuition. "Okay, I reached this kind of mineral at this depth, I know it's above my last strike, but it should still be around the same rock layer (depth) as before." *Guessed correctly.*

There are ways to sample the whole of the formation to find the exact materials you actually want to gather. Nearby rock formations show some consistency in the placement of those materials even. When collecting alumen III or whatever it was called for a while, mines within 50 malms had alumen at the same height, within 80 varied by one tick, 100 by two ticks, etc. If this isn't just coincidental luck that's been happening every time for 8+ ranks so far, then I'd say its a pretty great system.