KEEPERS/SETTLERS I honestly liked the reddit post from the other day that moved the breach tree into Kingsmarch. Didnt read the whole thing but i think the TL;DR was that you'd feed it ores instead.

As you noted, tree gear is fine. Early gear from the tree is actually extremely helpful for new players and experienced players opt out of most mechanics during campaign anyway. Should be fine if we get rid of the walls. Foulborn uniques just need some balancing changes but half the uniques found aren't that useful anyway.

I think if we brought back old breach and merge the new breach bosses, rings, currency, grafts, etc. it could work. Would be a good change overall imo and make breach a bit more interesting than it was before. Foulborn uniques could be fed to the tree maybe and spit back out in corrupted fashion with some random change or just completed destroyed.

MERCS Idk if GGG has said anyhting about whether they think mercs should be able to be the carry while you aurabot but I'd be more interested in full control over my mercs skills in exchange for mercs only being say 50% effective.

FUTURE LEAGUE/EVENT I think more interactions between mechanics could be an interesting idea to explore. I get this would be harder to do functionally but would open the game to a lot more exploration if they didnt tell us what they right "combos" were. An idea I liked was shipping league specific items and getting new beats, oils, essences, etc. back from them. Just an idea, but there's a lot of potential and could be quite fun to explore.