Since the latest snapshot dealt with removing unintuitive redstone behaviour and rendering and making redstone's behaviour more in line with its appearance, especially to help new players, I figured it would be a good idea to report this.

While redstone now always points into a block that it powers, there are a few odd cases left over in which redstone points into blocks but does not actually transmit power, which appears rather out of line with its intended behaviour. So these cases should probably be fixed for the sake of visual consistency and user-friendliness.

Case 1: Isolated redstone dust

When a single piece of redstone dust is placed in a completely flat area isolated from other components, it appears as a cross shape. This fits with the redstone's behaviour with it providing power to any blocks in said directions, however it still appears as a cross shape even if it doesn't have any of said blocks to point into. Redstone dust as an isolated piece should instead be made to only point in these directions if there exists a block that can be powered in one of these directions. If there are no blocks in range, it should instead assume the dot shape. If there is only one block present, it would use the newly-introduced and currently unused half-line shape, pointing from the center of the redstone's base block into the side of the target block as shown. Redstone with two or three adjacent blocks would assume a long line, L or T shape as appropriate, and only when surrounded on all four sides would redstone appear as the cross pattern, as only in this situation would a lone piece of redstone dust be providing power in all four directions.

Current behaviour:

Proposed fix:

Case 2: Long redstone lines

Long stretches made of redstone dust would be largely unchanged, since their behaviour almost completely matches up with how they render. However, the bare ends of redstone lines which are not pointing into a block would not assume the long line form that they do currently, as they aren't powering anything they're pointing into; they would instead assume the new short form instead as well (note how it only comes to halfway on the purpur block). If the line is pointing directly into a block, the line would still appear long like it currently does, as power is being directed into that block.

Current behaviour:

Proposed fix:

Case 2.5: Redstone lines next to walls (no change)

The appearance of redstone lines which are running parallel to a wall and are directly next to said wall would not change at all, as no power is being directed into the wall. The only exception would be if the wall is composed of conductive blocks, which is how it works currently anyway. Changing this would require many changes to redstone logic and break countless contraptions, and as such this should not be changed.

Case 3: Descending/ascending redstone lines and lines from power sources

This case is overall pretty similar to case 2. If redstone wire is placed on a block, a full block placed next to the wire orthogonally, and a second wire placed on this new block, the wires would only reach halfway on these blocks, unless there exists another block in the direction the wire points, in which case we get a full length wire. The same applies to redstone wire coming from power sources.

Current behaviour:

Proposed fix:

With these changes put in place, the appearance and actual behaviour of redstone wire should be almost completely in sync with each other. These changes would also allow for the return of the lone redstone dot texture, making it obtainable in survival mode again, as its effective removal has been one of the main criticisms of the 20w18a redstone changes, and these changes would also allow for the newly-introduced, currently unused half-length wire to be found legitimately.

While this ticket may be shut down as a feature request, I would say that this is addressing a very real existing issue with how redstone behaves and how it doesn't match up with how it displays. As 20w11a announced the patching out of "undefined" redstone behaviour, and 20w18a is the first snapshot to start putting these changes into action, it's no better time to start working on these kinds of anomalies to make sure that new players can more completely grasp redstone wire's habits from looking at it alone, to potentially aid resource pack creators to texture and model redstone in a cleaner way, among many other things.

Note that fixing this will require no actual changes to redstone logic - these issues are solely to do with the block states being used in the situations given, so the only changes needed to fix this will be to make sure the correct block states are used for each case, so that the circuitry displayed as a result matches up correctly with its functionality.

Thank you for your time.