After giving Refreshing Path a lot of thought lately, I think something needs to be done to make speed buffs more useful without making them the problem in combat that they are.
Thus, I had this idea.

First, the facts:
1) Getting from place to place faster seems to be the goal, often because the distance sucks to cross.
2) The character sheet says for all recovery stats "when in combat, you recover...".
3) The cost of movement speed buffs hasn't changed much, if at all, since before the Morrowind "Reco-pocalypse" nerfed recovery stats.
4) The speed buff skills have a high cost and short duration to prevent them from being always up in combat, because that has proven to be overpowered by virtue of making targeting difficult and snares mandatory and overpowered to compensate.
5) Rapid Maneuver ends if you cast anything on an enemy or ally, essentially entering combat, so is obviously meant to be used out of combat and has a super high cost to also encourage that.
6) Sprint is also used in combination with this and high stamina recovery to move as fast as possible.

So my idea is....
Why don't we make it so we can have movement speed buffs up constant easily "out of combat".

How?
1) We could make "out of combat" recovery much higher. I believe this is a number the developers can tweak and would definitely help us reducing downtime between fights, but it could be an issue in pvp if you are out of combat too quickly and easily when you haven't actually gotten away but then that could be fixed through Battle Spirit affecting that.
2) We could make the movement buffs all like Rapid Maneuver, usable while mounted, and have them last longer while out of combat, canceling when entering combat so forcing recast to the other "in combat version" with shorter duration, and having them cost nothing outside combat, like similar mechanics with the "War Mount" champion perk or Light of Cyrodiil "after interrupt" mechanic or any other "check if in combat" function.
3) We could make sprint cost a lot less, possibly even free, outside combat. This could be similarly to how mounts can sprint forever even once their stamina is gone but maybe without that issue as stamina is necessary as soon as you enter combat.

I really like this idea so that we can control how powerful the speed buffs are in combat while retaining the usefulness out of combat that everyone wants. Although personally, I think War Mount champion perk needs to be easier to get and we need some similar way to make sprint a lot less punishing out of combat for magicka characters and also not completely kill somebody sprinting because they're out of stamina before entering combat and get caught by surprise especially.

I think the best option is some changes like "when not in combat, sprint doesn't use stamina" and "when out of combat, (any movement buff skill) lasts X seconds(longer than in combat, like 20 seconds) and costs 0 magicka/stamina(or some other fairly small number)".

I don't think this would be difficult to make happen considering the similar things already coded in game as mentioned above.