u/Hazearil

Horses are currently something that have the potential to be better. If we want players to be more able to live in the world rather than using elytra to fly over everything, making horses more enjoyable to use sounds like a good call.

Stats and Breeding

First, we make horse breeding a bit easier, with the following changes:

• Horses from breeding are tamed, much like wolves and cats are. I would be fine with making the taming process itself for horses in the wild harder to compensate.
• Regular apples and carrots can be used to breed horses.
• Using a golden carrot on one of the parents guarantees that one randomly chosen stat cannot be lower than the one on that parent. Golden apples guarantee two stats, and if you are crazy enough, you can use enchanted golden apples for three stats.
• The minimum stats of horses and mules (but not donkeys) will be increased. Currently, a horse's minimal speed is barely above a player's walking speed. The minimum jump height is only 1.153 blocks, which is really low considering 1 block is standard for all mobs.
• The maximum speed and jump stats of donkeys will be reduced. It doesn't feel good that donkeys can be bred to just be as good as horses, while they are designed to be worse in exchange for the storage option.

Riding

• To make the movement more similar to player movement, horses get a separate walking and running mode, complete with animations. Walking is slower than horses are now, but running will make them a bit faster. This helps small-scale control while also making them faster, and making them feel more immersive.
• Melee attacks while riding a horse guarantee critical hits.
• While a popular suggestion is to make horses ignore leaves, I personally think that this is more a problem of the world generation, and not of horses.

Horse Armour

• For starters, they can stand being craftable. It feels weird that they follow the standard equipment tiers of armour but refuse to be craftable, aside from leather specifically for some reason. Making them craftable also reduces the need for players to hoard all the unstackable horse armour they may find. When adding enchantments and potentially treasure enchantments, horse armour found in loot can still have something beyond just crafting them.
• Basic enchantment compatibility would be given to the armour. In particular, the protection enchantments, thorns, feather falling, frost walker, and soul speed.

Other Changes

• Similar to Happy Ghasts, saddled horses will only wander up to 16 blocks away from the place they got saddled or were dismounted by a player.
• I was considering zebras, and by extension zorses and zonkeys, but IRL, zebras are not at all suitable for riding, both due to their temperament and their body structure. Mojang would never go along with zebras unless they aren't rideable.
• Camels currently aren't that good, and buffing horses kinda makes them worse. They could use a few buffs too; variable stats, and less speed reduction after a dash. Perhaps allowing chests to take up seats, to make them more useful for solo players.