The issues with food and regeneration in 1.11

Hello! I'm writing this post to talk about some of the issues with the new hunger system, and I hope to be able to elicit some discussion as well.

As I'm sure many of you know, 1.11 rebalanced hunger loss, significantly reducing the exhaustion caused by various tasks. You can see the new values here. The only exhaustion value that was increased was the exhaustion induced by regenerating a half-heart, up to a whopping 6.0.

In theory, these changes are good. For an exploration update, it's very nice to not need to consume olympian quantities of calories just because you're sprinting, and I have noticed in survival that my food consumption has gone down while walking. This is, in my opinion, a good change.

The issue comes when this food buff for normal activity clashes with a huge food nerf for regeneration. When your hunger bar is full, your saturation is immediately burned to be converted to health, and then the rate slows a bit once all the saturation is gone as the three half-shanks deplete to regenerate the rest.

Eating one piece of steak to exactly fill your hunger bar (with zero saturation) is enough to heal four hearts from saturation, plus another heart-and-a-half from the normal regeneration. At that point, just a few seconds later, your steak is gone, converted entirely into that health.

And the 85% full hunger bar tends to stay that way, since there's no regeneration at that point, and every other form of hunger depletion is so slow. So it becomes necessary to eat again, wasting 2.5 food points, just so the bar can fill up and regeneration can continue.

Essentially, combat demands food to be consumed at an incredible rate compared to normal activity. I don't want to propose a fix, but share the facts and what I've observed.