I mean, I don't dislike much of the lower level gameplay and exploration? I enjoy things more when more toys are out and about, but if the starting stuff was a major downer to me I wouldn't have started, like, dozens of new worlds or whatever over however many hundreds of hours I've sunk into terraria (steam says 2009, but I think a lot of that was it idling in the background, ha). Do tend to prefer wings (or just fall damage negation), but that's mostly because fall damage is kinda' wonky and I'd rather... not. Deal with having to worry about it.
I just dislike the mining, or more accurately find vein miner to be an order of magnitude better play experience, making digging massively less tedious and just generally making the exploration and progression much smoother, on top of having some neat applications outside of specifically mining out ore patches.
Honestly, so far as progression goes, with what I've experienced with journey mode I legitimately think I'd just prefer vein miner. It similarly reduces the pain of a lot of the grind, but in a way that still has you spelunking around plenty and digging stuff up. It just, y'know, mostly removes the part of the digging that's friggin' make-work. Add on maybe luiafk or something to nix potion tedium and things are just... smooth. Slick. You can ramble around exploring and playing the game without much need or incentive to interrupt that to spend too much time slowly digging up another patch of iron or whatever.