I have been working for years trying to come up with a way to make exploration mechanically fun.
Nothing yet.
The thing is, I think a lot of people look back at their years in scouts or camping with their family or watching the hours of walking to epic music in LotR and think 'yet, that's the think I want!', but then try to apply that to a survival scenario where you're trying not to die while nature tries to kill you in the slowest, most narratively unsatisfying ways.
Survival is logistics and bean counting and failure looks like days of death spiral before you finally die from filling your pants with intense diarrhea because you ate or drank the wrong thing in delirious desperation. Not really the thing of high action fantasy.
Meanwhile, the enjoyable parts of hiking and camping are things that aren't really mechanical: seeing the majesty of nature, getting fresh air, the peace and quiet, etc.
Unless we're going to start having things like a buff for seeing a really pretty meadow and less 'you get death spiral malueses for not counting rations', we're not going to get far.
So the way I look at it is, D&D expects you to survive in the wilderness. It really does. You can load up on rations, there's magic to conjure or purify drinking water or even replace rations, and even Background abilities designed to make you more efficient at this sort of thing.
So the benefit isn't really "having the ability to survive". That's a given. What's cool is when you can provide a useful benefit like that without really needing to expend resources. If you're in this dense primeval forest and you're not sure what way to go, sure, someone could cast Find the Path or whatever. But having a character who is like "no guys, I got this, we go this way", is really a reward in of itself.
What I like to do in my own games is not really demand proficiency out of my players- even if they fail, that just leads to things that are more interesting than "you travel safely through the forest", like encounters or tripping over the unknown.
But for those who really can excel at these things, I throw out little bonuses, like, you find a patch of healing herbs, or a tree with edible bark that's a delicacy, or a clue to a Green Dragon's lair- not something you can investigate fully
now, but that you can come back to later.
I don't think we need a bespoke system for this sort of thing; most of the DMing techniques I've learned didn't come from rules or subsystems, but instead just the designer talking about what you can do to make the game more fun. I got more mileage out of the 1e DMG's list of Tricks and Traps or the medicinal properties of herbs and gems than I ever did with Gary talking about dice and probability curves or having a table for "Assassination success rate".
Actual advice, you know, is the way to go here. We used to have entire books devoted to this stuff, like Sandstorm or Dungeonscape in 3.5, where you just talk about "hey, this is how this sort of environment can be interesting".
The Ranger's big problem is, one, the DM has to
want the wilds to be interesting, as well as to know
how to make them that way. Without it, he's just his knock off Paladin variant with way more ribbon features.
And that strikes me as very interesting; like, you don't need trap filled dungeons or locked doors for the Rogue to be a good class. You can play a Cleric in a game where you never encounter a single undead, and you're fine. But playing a Ranger with no real opportunities to guide people through a forest or survive in a desert, or track down some dangerous beast? Kind of meh, which is why people immediately look to the subclass to make the class interesting.
Not every class needs a subclass to really make it shine, which I think is the way we should look at design. The base class needs to really pop, and do check all the boxes before we add this extra bit of flair.
