Here's a thought
>Samus finds her gunship but it's broken and repair systems are offline
>So she uses the psychic abilities to modify it slightly for land traversal
>You travel across the land in the gunship and it acts like a cool mini tank, mostly use it to explore or go from place to place
>Halfway through the game when you upgrade your psychic abilities you can modify it to fly
>Unlocks fast travel and now you're able to fly over the open world and reach new areas like say a sky fortress or deep into a volcano with a temple near the top
I dunno, it feels like there's a million better ways of incorporating open world traversal into Metroid than just "durrr Samus gets a bike lolz"