Craftable saddles make me a little sad. Anyone else?

I'm not even against craftable saddles in general. Like, they open up a ton of content to the earlier parts of the game, where more relevant (i'm thinking mules here, or even striders for bad nether spawns).

BUT to me, in my gameplay, saddles were one of the most pivotal exploration-/treasure- based progress points. They kept the very-early game relatively local (or seabound, if far), and gave really fun exploration RNG gambling. Finding a mob spawner used to be pivotal in early cave exploration. Getting unlucky and finding multiple spawners where none had a saddle, that was the perfect kind of RNG excruciation that made for challenge and variety and reward and fun.

IDK, it's hard because like I said, I support the change overall... but it just feels off to me. (In general, I feel vanilla survival has been trending towards an aesthetically pleasing sandbox, with increasingly fewer RPG-based elements, these past few years. Maybe some prefer this, but to my intimate survival worlds, I'm sad.) Craftable saddles feel like a tiny change that represents a giant vibe shift to me. I'm thrown off.