So Unity have been making great efforts to improve the render pipelines, terrain system, input system and UI. They also acquired TextMeshPro, Cinemachine and ProBuilder, which massively improve on core features in Unity.
I think the next thing they should see about improving is the Character Controller, either by creating a new one, or buying the rights to an existing one. The great thing about using an engine like Unity, as opposed to pure code, is being able to focus on just making a game and not reinventing the wheel. They’ve greatly improved on that in other areas, but when it comes to controlling characters, we’re still stuck either using a really basic character controller that lacks features, or having to spend money on a third party one (and even they tend to require a lot of modifying to work with specific games).
Uhm, why? You don’t have to buy one or use the one from unity.
I barely use the charactercontroller. I use rigidbody to make my own charactercontroller.
Nothing is stopping you from writing your own system that works exactly the way you want it.
In fact, thats what most people are doing. unity is open-ended in making scripts, so you are free to make anything you need yourself. The fact they are available for purchase means someone has already done this work and wants to be paid for their time.
TLDR: Either buy one, make one, or make do with what you have.
Game requirements differs from each other a lot in terms of what character is and how it should be controlled. Character controller just oversimplifying it for some common cases. For what you want unity team needs to develop specialized controlles for every game genre, wich seems not possible at all.
Unity made a new official one but it’s much harder than they expected to get right ( New Standard Asset Characters - Third Person ). Instead, I recommend Kinematic character controller (KCC) from asset store if you can program. It’s by far the most robust I’ve encountered.
It is a modest cost but it will solve whatever character controller issue you come across.