Over my adult life I completed many construction or property improvement projects and learned what is plausible for me to do in a given amount of time with my current resources. I also see what approaches hold up over time. Stupidly simple things tend to persist, while something that's "engineered", meaning a complex arrangement of components is involved, will eventually fail.
I put a culvert and stream crossing on the service road into our woods . The culvert and road is holding up well because it's so simple. It's a huge pipe in a stream course covered with many tons of dirt and gravel. The culvert created an erosion problem, though on the downstream side. It's basically like a giant fire hose on very rainy days, so I built some erosion control measures as well, but those did not hold up well over time.
I stacked up dozens of bags of concrete to get the water to drop about 6 feet in controlled steps. I was hoping it would slow enough to deposit sand and gravel and eventually reshape the drop to a gradual slope. For several years, it actually worked. However, one big rain storm obliterated the "steps". Dozens of 80 pound blocks were pushed several yards down the stream. I'd probably need to pour the concrete in giant man-made boulders for it to really work. Basically it's not possible to maintain an "arranged" structure like that over such widely varying conditions. I notice in the stream beds that are adjacent to our property, only the fridge-sized boulders stay put. Almost every other rock eventually moves somewhere.
Over the past several weeks, I've been building a trail through the woods and contending with some muddy patches. Over the decades, people who owned the same property did as well, and they tried a handful of different solutions to the mud problem. Again, the simplest ones seem to be the best ones. The "planned" ones stink. For example, burying drainage pipe of various kinds is almost invariably bad. It will eventually fail and can't be repaired or even maintained and nobody will even know where it is. The easiest approaches, like digging a ditch to divert water from a path, or filling a low spot with rocks will last.
I built a couple of corduroy roads (logs or straight branches placed on muddy patches). Those work very well, even better than rocks or pavers in many cases, because rocks sink into the mud over not too many freeze/thaw cycles. The maintenance of the corduroy road is easy and inexpensive. Variations on that theme, like a bridge or elevated walkway are also pretty decent solutions, though they're more expensive and can be overly elaborate and fail-prone as well.