There's a lot of hidden costs and infrastructure needed for magical flying beasts. Not to mention limited capacity. Little can compete with the horse drawn cart when it comes to capacity for price though.
I have giant hummingbird mounts in my game, but guess what? They need nectar from giant flowers, or just barrels full of sugar water, and/or they sometimes pick fights with giant insects in order to try and eat them. (Fun fact, hummingbirds eat small insects IRL) They're dead useful and loads of fun, but it exacts its price.
I'm so very glad that I never tried to enlarge my pseudodragon familiar to try and ride him into battle. Never even thought about the fact that pseudodragons cannot pay attention for shit.
Plus, not every species can be domesticated. Gryphons and dragons are independent and not herd animals. So they may not understand the concept of following a leader, which is an important part of domestication. And if they did, you'd probably have to best them in combat before they'd do it.
There are positives and negatives to both platforms. Lemmy has an abundance of information about Linux and memes about Star Trek but misses out on literature discussion and completely lacks the ability to recognize sarcasm. 4chan is a concentrated discussion hub where every interaction is seen and evaluated, but occasionally it hosts a slight hint of bigotry.
You would just not believe the regulatory burden of maintaining magical creature flying safety regime too.
You drop a simple glove off directing and 30min later, boom. You've got a gnome commission setting up barriers around it and paperwork for weeks to come..
They are now because you can still get petrol reasonably cheaply. When the price rises because everyone else has gone over to electric I think they'll be less interested. Part of the problem is that there's a whole generation of people who've grown up with loud noise equals cool car.
Pretty soon though there'll be a whole generation for whom the vast majority of cars were electric their whole lives and I suspect they'll be less interested in petrol cars. It'll become a much more niche hobby.
Even for luxury cars that run on petrol, there's been a need to mimic old engine sounds so that the owners don't feel like their cars are underpowered.
I bought my 30 year old car 15 years ago for $2000 and it still runs well and hasn't needed too much in the way of repair. Find me an electric that can do the same and I'll make the jump in a second.
Find a 1994 EV in good nick? I can find you 2024 internal combustion cars that won't last 15 years; I can find you a 2024 EV whose manufacturer says will last a million miles (or maybe that's the 2025 version), that's 33.3 thousand miles a year for 30 years. But that manufacturer lies.
Did your car claim a greater than 30 year low maintenance life when new? Is its lifespan typical of the model?
Can we take your position as "has an outlier lifespan car, doesn't want to replace it"? My last car I sold was 20 years old and had seats with worn out cloth (and exposed padding) and broken plastic trim around its adjustment controls
Nissan leaf battery replacements were a minor repair when the first of those needed them. They got much better than new batteries for pretty cheap
A more accurate analogy would be along the lines of having jets and helicopters in the world but still using cars or trains as the main form of transportation.
Fall off a horse -> dust yourself off and get back on. There's a whole idiom about how falling off horses is a frustrating but ultimately minor inconvenience.
Most fantasy settings that allow for gryphon / dragon / other winged mode of transport, also have saddles for such beasts that tether the user to the saddle/ animal. If you fall off, you unclipped your harness and deserved it.
Just because there is magic doesn’t mean everyone can afford it.
Also interesting to think about, if a deaf person has a magic amulet that grants different hearing, are they no longer a deaf person or are they a deaf person with a magical aid?
I remember seeing the same for trans people, but in granblue fantasy some people still weaponized how Cagliostro was a born a man to make her mad, doesn't matter how she looks or what she has down there, bigots will exist even in fantasy.
Fantasy worlds really often have sex as something one may select. It doesn't serve the non-binary folk all that well, but there are several ways to pick either of the binary options
Another problem is that in order to have magic that is capable of fully transitioning someone, you basically need to enable full body modification for other purposes as well, so transhumanism becomes something you need to represent in your story (unless you just add arbitrary and meaningless restrictions to the magic).
They can totally exist in fantasy settings, but there has to be a reason why magic "doesn't work" to heal that. "It's a curse" or "there's a powerful magical will" or whatever.
If it's DnD, it can easily escalate into whether Reincarnation "fixes" that, since the person is getting a new body of a possibly different race.
There are deaf people in our world that refuse cochlear implants. Why the hell does magic need a reason to "not work" when people IRL prefer to stay the way they are?
Nope. Stop with the fucking ableist erasure of differently abled individuals. It's just a fun little game to play with friends. It doesn't need fucking massive essays of world building.
A horse costs way less than a scroll of Teleport, or seven Fly. Like how it's cheaper to drive than take a plane. You also don't take a plane when an hour long drive will do, and you don't cast Teleport to go from your room at the inn to the nearby village to clear out some goblins.
Towns can hire wizards to make teleportation circles to make quick cheap travel to specific places. No one more than an hour's ride from a capital would use any other way of getting there