It's never been normal to have a world generate with tons of floating blocks and sharp high straight walls.
I't always been relatively smooth everywhere except for mountain type biomes and even then nowhere near as bad as this.
You know what would work even better? An NBT tag for hiding the durability bar. Could be as easy as "DurabilityBar:0" for off and "DurabilityBar:1" for on...
Ran into this this evening. Very aggravating. Win10, 1.7.1
I tried putting a single bucket of lava over the top of the drop (it's currently a 4x2 column) across some fence gates and will see if that helps force the guardians down.