It would help too if there were multiple abilities to handle each obstacle. As an example, SotN had double jump, super jump, and bat form, and extended mist form, and wolf form. There are various kinds of ledges, gaps, chasms and so forth that you could get through by having 2 or 3 of these but none of them would work for everything. And good roguelikes already do stuff like this. Using Nethack as an example, there's places you need to cross water (swimming, water walking, levitation, teleportation), reach rooms with no passages (teleporting, pickaxes, wand of digging), the shops (you need gold, or a means of stealing things, like a pet or invis or teleportation or digging or fighting the shopkeepers) altars (sacrificing corpses, converting them, converting yourself, if it has a priest you can pay him or fight him to covert it...) even things we don't associate with the whole 'backtrack to collect stuff' theme like shops really reinforce the feeling of progression. I definitely miss having that kind of stuff when I'm playing DoomRL or Brogue.