This has got to be one of the MOST OP suggestions I have EVER SEEN. Iron is way to common for this. By endgame, or even by the time they go to fight the Dragon, most players have more than enough iron to make a small pyramid. The Wither isn't all that hard to beat if the player uses some potions, and since the star has a 100% drop rate, it becomes fairly easy for the player to get at least one star and make a beacon. They can then throw in a stack of iron, giving them over an hour, travel to the end, and kill the dragon with ease. The reason that beacons are so limited is that they're immensely powerful. A player with constant regen, resilience, strength, speed, and some enchanted diamond armor would absolutely decimate a server if they could travel around. The area limit means that you only have an advantage closer to home.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Your brain is so powerful, it would take a state of the art computer the size of a factory to come even close to matching the processing power.
When giving the beacon an item to buff the players allow the buff to affect the players for as many minutes as items that are given to the beacon.
IE: Give the beacon 40 iron bars and anyone in the 40 block radius recieves the buff for 40 minutes.
This way when you have Haste to dig further faster you can go far enough away for it to matter.
And you can use Strength to explore the nether.
So on and so forth.
You literally have to build the pyramid where you want to use it, otherwise it's completely useless.