It would be great if we had a config to adjust the turning sensitivity of the horse at different speeds. I wouldn't want to increase the slow/walking speed turning sensitivity, but when running at full speed the horse turns very slowly. I understand this is probably to add an element of realism, but considering the vanilla controls allow you to turn literally instantaneously we should be able to turn up the horse steering sensitivity a bit. Also as a bonus, it would be good if turning the horse had some smoothing/acceleration to the input, so quick taps would be smoothed out but holding the button down would let you turn increasingly harder to a point. Basically a non-linear response curve for smoother turning inputs.

Another thing I would like to see is a mechanism to prevent the horse from reversing when you're trying to stop. Currently if you hold S to slow down and stop you will keep slowing until the horse starts walking backwards, and you have to balance between forward and backward to get the horse to actually stop, which is quite difficult. The horse should only start reversing if you are at a standstill first, so holding S while running/walking will only slow the horse to a complete stop, and to get it to reverse you would have to press S again. The same should happen when stopping the horse from reversing (i.e. require an extra forward button press from a standstill to start walking forward), or just make the horse stop walking backwards as soon as the button is released because you wouldn't need to walk long distances backwards.

Making all of this behaviour configurable would also be very appreciated.

Adding onto this, a double tap of W or S to speed up or stop immediately would be very useful