I don’t want to spend 30 minutes traveling from one side of a map to the next

I'm not talking 30 minutes. There should be options that let the player do it in a few, depending on the scale.

Just let me get there immediately so I can talk to this single person and get this item I will never use.

You're encouraging bad design in order to facilitate bad content. There also shouldn't be much if any mailman content either, that's just filler.