This is an interesting idea. One of the things I most liked about FH2, still the best of the series, is that we got to know the map really well, and the best routes between places, because it was designed with those hubs in mind, and there was only so much fully open world, so you really did follow the same roads a lot, including the best motorway, for sure!
You really got a good sense of where things were on the map. By comparison, NFS Rivals had an amazing map and was really fun to just drive around, but the overview map was a bit useless, and so while I knew some areas very well, quite how they all fit together was sometimes hard to work out. I learnt certain routes well, because you really had to, but would still struggle to point to them on the map.
In FH5 we don’t even need roads to traverse the map; it is usually just a matter of pointing in the right direction and driving, bar the odd water hazard or being stuck in the canyon. In fact it is much more of a hassle to go by road, and as has been mentioned, nothing keeps you on them as everything is destructible. But yeah I’ve never learnt any road routes in 5, and I don’t think that taking away fast travel would change that, because of how the map is designed.
It is also curious that Guanajuato and Edinburgh are so much more annoying to drive around than the cities in FH2. I mean the roads are definitely crazy too, but they also stick out hugely in the otherwise very open world, whereas FH2’s hubs weren’t so out of place in that world, and the main impediment to driving through them was the lethal sticking out staircases.
Actually, seeing as I’ve been playing a lot of Riders Republic, instead of just no fast travel, I’d like to see something like rocket wings. The experience of flying over such open worlds is really cool, and you get to view things from literally a different angle, and often see things you would have missed from a grounded perspective - of course helped by there being more than 500 collectibles in that case. But yeah it is a joy, and flying around while waiting for multiplayer queues to pop is fun in and of itself.