One of my favourite features of the 1.9 update were the new boats, because I was finally able to ride them without them suddenly breaking whenever they hit something. However, boats are not as useful as they could be due to the fact that rivers often get too thin or just disappear altogether. Not only does this make rivers virtually useless, it also makes them an eye-sore, as they're just a string of lakes in some sort of winding valley throughout the Minecraft world. Could we get a river overhaul sometime in the future?

My suggestion would be to make sure that rivers are always at least 3-5 blocks wide, so that they're navigable by boats, and I can use them to cross a landmass if I wanted to. Because as of now, rivers feel very like an incomplete feature.