Water elevators powers by soul sand are slowly ceasing to cooperate.

Water elevators are slowly ceasing to work in Minecraft with multiple bugs affecting it causing the water elevator to simply not work or requiring the user to place each water block on the water elevator individually. Water elevators should be as simple at placing a single water bucket at the top of the water elevator with soul sand at the bottom and another item or sorts which stops the water flow allowing the player to enter the water elevator. After a year of use my water elevator in my survival world stopped working unexpectedly. I'm hoping this gets brought to attention. It may only seem like a slight error but it has brought me great frustration.