junawood

That sounds great. But it would be really sad if you couldn't create your own ponds/wells/bathtubs/whatever anymore.

What do you mean by that? Will it still be possible to use a bucket to add a water block somewhere, at least to get rid of currents where they really made no sense at all? Right now I find it a tiny bit annoying that you absolutely need a bucket for some things, while IRL you could even fill a pond just using your cupped hands.

To start at the end... In my experience, caves are not the best way to find ore. They can be nice to explore and sometimes you find something, and, with the rock exposed, it's quick and easy to use the propick. But it's just too much a matter of luck to find anything while just running around in caves, let alone the ore you were looking for. Sometimes you find massive caves with probably thousands of blocks exposed and there's nothing but some quartz, which would be a lot easier to mine from a cliff above ground or when you just dug down from a spot where you found a lot of quartz stones on the ground. But to make things a little easier in caves, I'd recommend bringing a lot of torches to light up your way and areas where you want to stay for some time. If you don't do that, drifters can even block your way out of your own brand-new mine that was totally free of drifters when you dug your way down. And unless you're in a safe spot where they can't reach you, use a longblade instead of a spear. It's much faster.

Well, IRL more and more things are done by machines. Even what you said about automatically collecting eggs is already done. Sooooo.... Not sure what is closer to reality nowadays or a better way to escape reality: having them collected by machines or collecting them yourself. But, just to make that clear, I'm not against being able to automate things in the game. Being able to doesn't mean you have to and in every world that you start, and I think it's nice to be able to play a game in different ways.

If you don't want to wait the whole night... just find something to do. Leave things to do in the base for the night instead of doing them during the day, like cooking, smithing, sorting, all kinds of crafting and improving your base. Do whatever outside of your base and just be a little bit more careful or maybe prepare an area with lights and walls to be able to work there without interruption by drifters. Or simply use the night for mining. Somehow couldn't come up with enough things to do for a whole night? Just skip some hours in a bed. And if you really want to skip the whole night, just tab -> t -> /time set sunrise and enjoy the next morning.