This suggestion isn’t for me as much as it is for the people who want to travel without waypoints. Personally, I don’t think mounts should be in the game, but if they had to I think this suggestion might be a good way to have them work.
Roads in MMORPGs are commonly used as faster ways to travel around without interruptions from enemy NPCs. Sometimes within Guild Wars 2 there are events such as roadblocks, but overall there is hardly ever any exploration involved in them except for getting to towns. I feel that this could make roads some middle ground between the people who want mounts and people who don’t.
Most MMORPGs don’t really need to worry about mounting vs exploration because they restrict most or all of their adventurous exploration to running through caves, buildings, or instanced areas and by not involving the jump key too often outside of those areas. It feels like other MMORPGs took mounting into consideration when designing their world by restricting exploration to places where they could easily force players off of mounts. Guild Wars 2 has things like Vistas and jumping puzzles that don’t always take place in areas where there is as clear of an excuse to dismount a player. There are also some zones in this game that have very rugged terrain that involves lots of jumping. Guild Wars 2 does not seem like it was designed to handle mounting. It just doesn’t look right or seem practical to have mounts jumping to exploration objectives with how much jumping is involved.
Thinking of that gave me an idea. Because the game did not restrict exploration to areas of the world to only where mounts couldn’t possibly be used, why not restrict mounts to roads? This way the game keeps players exploring on foot yet also offers a faster way to travel between two points.