Mining in Minecraft is quite brainless and monotonous, you can mine down anywhere in the world and get all sorts of minerals. This project is an attempt to fix this.

What it does is reduce the amount of most types of ore blobs generated in the world and add new types of ore veins to replace them. These are larger than ore blobs but smaller and more fragmented than vanilla ore veins (iron and copper, which have been replaced) and tend to cluster together in certain regions of the world, although smaller ones can appear anywhere.
I believe this is better than the vanilla ore generation because:

It's progressive: minerals are harder to find at the beginning of the game, but become easier once you obtain knowledge of where each type of ore vein is distributed.
Encourages exploring the underground of different parts of the world. Veins provide clues as to where high-density regions might be, and you can never know if you only explore the surface.
Encourages building infrastructure: if you find a region with a lot of veins of a specific mineral, you'll probably want to go back there multiple times.
Mitigates the Fortune problem: the existence of the Fortune enchantment discourages players from mining in early game, because mining a ore block without the enchantment means wasting some of the mineral, and saving the coordinates of each ore blob to mine it later would just be a waste of time. On the other hand, saving a large ore vein or high-density region for later is feasible.
Makes the Night Vision potion more useful: spotting ore veins in the caves is important to find more of them.

The veins added are (Images):

Redstone and coal (y<0 and y>0 respectively)
Iron and copper (y<0 and y>0 respectively, replace the vanilla ones)
Gold and lapis (both y<0)
Diamond and emerald (both y<0, rare)
Nether gold and Nether quartz (y<32)
Regions rich in redstone are poor in coal, regions rich in coal are poor in redstone, regions rich in iron are poor in copper and so on.

Requires Custom Ore Veins. This mod is actually a datapack packaged as a mod, but that may change in the future.

Create compat datapack (adds zinc veins): download

Regional Ore Veins

Custom Ore Veins