Pokemon has stayed relativity the same and it is the top-selling RPG in the world, and IMO, my favorite video game series. Mario also stay relatively unchanged with its 2d platforming games, and Sonic is considered to have gotten worse the moment it went to 3d by A LOT of people. Legend of zelda has also remained basically unchanged. Final fantasy, besides the addition of the action bar instead of regular turn based systems, most people consider the moment they changed from that even slightly (ie, FF12 to some extent and FF13) made the series worse off in comparison. so yes, generally, it is best to stick with what works and not change it unless you think you have to.
I mention morrowind, becuase nearly EVERYONE on this forum considers it much better than skyrim and repeatedly hate on skyrim using examples that are also in morrowind or are worse in morrowind, but convietly choose to forget. including the fact that a lot of people wnat morrowind travel system back, which includes said carriages at every city (not just certain ones).
Considering you have a bunch of threads that are all complaining about something in skyrim, yeah, it is pretty easy to assume you hate it or love complaining about in some form.
BTW, you opening post is flawed when you assume that you can ignore fast travel but somehow cannot ignore carriages, because that makes literally no sense. why can you not ignore carriages. and lets not even get started on the fact, most good RPG's that have the whole area to travel through have some way to get from one visited town to another easily and without interruption, so you do not have to travel back and forth to the cities when you have to.
EDIT: as for the game mod option, waste of time and money on something few would use.