Hey, so I've come across this issue when I was trying to balance/plan my Plants Expansion mod... And I came to the conclusion that Berry Bushes are too easy to propagate. Think about it, you can run through a field/forest, pickup 40~ berry bushes, and then plant them the next day no problem! It's always felt a little immersion breaking to be carrying around a stack of berry bushes that you can store indefinitely, and then plant again whenever you want.
The "solution" I came up with was first of all, not being able to break a berry bush and get the bush back (perhaps with shears you could). Instead, you would need to use a knife, on a flowering berry bush to get a "cutting" (this would revert the berry bush to its empty state). A "cutting" would basically be a sapling, but for berry bushes, except that the "cutting" item would dry out over 36~ hours, so you'd need to plant it before it dries out and dies. AND, cuttings would have a smaller stack size (I was thinking of a stack size of 8).
The next part of my solution was to possibly add a year counter to berry bushes, and increase berry yields over the years (so a bush that is 10 years old would have better yields than a 2 year old plant ). Plus, I'd change the world gen to make more rare, but with much larger berry bush patches. This could be thought of as a resource that you'd routinely come back to (no different than how you have to go looking for mushrooms)
This would obviously drastically change how we use berry bushes right now, but I think it'd be awesome if we could find a massive old growth patch of blueberry bushes, and then keep coming back there. The current meta is to just grab as many berry bushes as you can, plop them down at your base, and forget about them, which, while fun, leaves me wanting more.
I think this system (or something like it) could help make berries feel less broken, while still leaving them as an important food source.
