DianaDeer

These lines puzzle me because they almost seem to imply that you haven't played actually played through the game progression and are only basing your opinion on second-hand information, in which case i would encourage you to try experiencing the game as it is, instead of focusing on the number of steps in the tech tree; knowing that the endgame involves early modern-ish levels of technology tells you nothing about how it feels like to go through it, figure out how to obtain the required resources, build the necessary infrastructure... The way you talk about mods also feels weird, vanilla VS comes way closer to the experience you want than vanilla MC ever could yet you're complaining that it's worse than heavily modded MC while also refusing to engage with modded VS, even though VS is so much more mod-friendly: the modding API is so well-implemented that mods often remain compatible through major version updates and the engine is so optimized that even my 2016 laptop can run modded VS on low-medium settings at higher fps than vanilla MC on low with performance mods.

Personally I would much rather see this added as a straight-up QoL feature rather than as a new mechanic; my main annoyance with traders is that there's no simple way to keep track of basic information about their stock even after having spoken with them recently ("wait, was this guy buying *Golden* Necklaces or *Noble* Necklaces?", "has the commodities trader changed their stock yet?"), so the way I'd implement it is to make it so that speaking to a trader adds or updates a minimap waypoint containing information about *either* their current stock + how long it's going to last (if their stock hasn't changed since the last time you interacted) *or* a simple message reminding you that they have new stock, which is basically information a player could keep track of in vanilla already if one bothered to write this stuff down every single time they interacted with a trader.