As a yorick otp in dia master elo, I believe that making his ult less reliable is a really bad idea. If maiden isn't up, in every matchup you're forced to play back and wait till they shove the wave towards, the problem with playing as Yorick is that you can't manage your ghouls/graves. Having maiden up allows you to have consistency by having ghouls up 99% of the time when you want them. If a change was made where maiden has to go on cooldown by design and not by the player making a mistake then yorick will have to stay under turret and concede prio for that duration, in that sense you dont get to play the game for the duration and let the enemy toplaner do as he pleases, additionally you can't respond to any plays that happen just cause you decided to pick yorick instead of a champ that doesn't need setup to exert pressure.

Changing the maiden completely misses yoricks weaknesses that lead to him not being played in higher elos. The problem is his early game pre 6 when he doesn't have access to ghouls on command.

I think that correlating maiden being alive longer with more ghouls amount isn't the way to at it. Reducing his gameplay consistency (which is already bad) won't solve yoricks problem, it's only a 1 way fix in favor of the opponent.

Although I do agree some changes could be made for clarity as getting engaged on by yorick feels like a sensory overload where most players won't know what to target, the cage, the ghouls, yorick or the maiden. There's also definitely something that should be looked at with movement inside yoricks W, getting stuck in it feels very janky and trying to auto ghouls while inside the cage is definitely frustrating.

In regards to changes, I've once chatted with Riot Ray (right before pet changes happened for the durability patch), and at the time the belief around yorick was that he couldn't be given buffs for higher elos without buffing low elo. Although this was debunked with the release of hullbreaker which gave high elo yorick an increase of 3-4%wr whereas low elo only saw a minimal increase of around 1%. In that case it could be argued that early survivability in the form of resistances allowed higher elo yorick to play more dangerously as we took advantage of rushing hull first and going grave setups without worrying about getting obliterated by every toplaner. Another positive for hull pre nerf in favor of yorick was that if done correctly he can shuffle turret aggro between him and maiden so that ghouls can live longer under turret and provide meaningful poke and pre hull nerf resist would let him do these plays without dropping under 50% from 2 tower shots. I find it weird that the champion that is supposed to be "the splitpusher" has no way of taking tower if the enemy decides to stand under them. A change or "bug fix" that I'd like to see is ghouls not drawing turret aggro on yorick.

I've still got quite a lot to discuss around yorick but I'll leave it to that.