First, I don't think I buy your argument that these things are at odds with one another.

A lot of these games don't actually have that large a world. Most are bounded and are ultimately not that that big. And a lot of your argument isn't even about how these qualities are at odds - it's just a sustained, blanket argument against hunger and thirst mechanics in general.

As others have said, it sounds like you don't actually want a survival game. What you want is an exploration game with some of the trappings that have become common to "survival" games - you explicitly do not want mechanics that require you to gather resources to survive and that sort of precludes survival games.

You want an exploration game with things like the sort of crafting you see in survival games. Which is a pretty reasonable thing to want. I suspect we'll see more of that kind of thing soonish too. It's bound to happen.

I suspect we'll also see more survival games that do emphasize nomadic gameplay. The problem there is that it can start to feel pointless - if everything you do is just temporary before you move on and have to start over, that doesn't make for a very compelling experience. It's probably possible to add variety through new challenges and a little bit of progression, but that's a very tough thing to design, especially since no one has really done a great job of it yet - there are no real examples to look to.

But that's not at all required for a survival game. That's just a different type of survival game. You could still easily make a very compelling survival game focused on a single building. A huge map and exploration of new areas aren't necessarily key elements. Imagine a single building, you're barricaded in on the fifth floor, and you have to go up to the roof to fix a leak and you don't know what caused it. Or you need to venture downstairs to scavenge for a pipe fitting and you don't know who or what has gotten into the apartments down there since you were last there. That's plenty compelling. The key to the survival element is that different areas have different uncertainty about safety - you know your base is relatively safe, but you don't know how safe you are in various other areas and you have to try your luck and/or try to reduce your uncertainty or prepare for possible problems.

On the other hand, I think there are problems with survival games. The biggest one is that no survival game has yet built a very compelling "endgame".

If you go play Rust, the most compelling part of the game by far is the first few nights. The most breathtaking moment I've ever had in a survival game was my first night in Rust - I built a fire and a hut in a clearing, ventured out into the grass to collect more wood for the fire, and heard something. I crouched in the grass, unmoving as someone walked into my little camp with a weapon, went through all of my things, and searched around for me. It was a visceral experience. Trying to find the things I needed to survive in that state of constant fear, trying to be as quiet and unobtrusive as possible, was incredible.

And then you build a decent fort, you get guns and armor and...suddenly the game is all about "raiding". It's not a survival game anymore. Everyone can easily survive. People are just killing one another and invading each other's homes because there's nothing else to do. You might as well just go play Counter Strike. At best, the satisfaction you get from winning is the satisfaction of forcing someone else to start over from scratch - which isn't usually a very sportsmanlike attitude to be fostering.

I'm honestly not totally sure that survival games should have an endgame. Maybe they should be like single-player games where you hit a point and you've beaten them and that's it and you can restart if you want to do it again.

I would be very interested to see someone make one of these modern survival games, but something more in the vein of Oregon Trail - an incentive to move (that being the victory condition), a risk of not moving fast enough, progression that renders certain obstacles unproblematic, but they're replaced by new obstacles to contend with.

I strongly suspect the "survival" genre is going to see a three-way split. We're going to see actual survival games where that survival experience is the primary goal - more like the Oregon Trail situation. We're also going to see games that ditch many of the survival mechanics and are more about exploration - they keep the crafting and all that, but the crafting is about increasing your capability to build and explore, not about subsisting. And we're going to see games that ditch the initial "survival" phase of these current games and cater to a more-fleshed-out persistent base-building and "raiding" game.