Possible 5e House Rules to Consider

This is just an ongoing list where I can keep track of a few house-rules I've seen online and want to consider further.

Exhausting Injuries. The lingering injury rules from the DMG are interesting, but fairly harsh at low levels. But a level of exhaustion each time a PC is reduced to 0 or fewer HP seems reasonable and easy. Maybe allow Barbarians or anyone else who has class features that can grant exhaustion a difficult Con save (DC 15?) to resist this exhaustion from being knocked out.

Shorter short rests. From the DMG, basically make short rests about 10 minutes to coincide with rituals. Nicely gives the PCs a time constraint on rituals: you rest or do a ritual, but maybe not both.

Hidden death saves. The results of a death saving throw aren't public, so they party won't necessarily know if they have another round to save their friend.

Firing into melee. I generally dislike fumble rules, but firing into melee sort of demands a chance to hit your allies. Doing it on a natural 1 seems reasonable, though halflings will be strangely immune to it because of their lucky trait.

Group initiative. From the DMG. It can be super quick/easy to just sit people in initiative order and roll once for the group, then everyone adds their individual modifiers. A little complex because a barbarian, for example, might get his own die roll and jump ahead but that's probably not a big deal. Would let the players coordinate things better.

Individual initiative with weapon speeds. From the DMG. Alternately, to make combats a bit less clear, characters declare their actions first and roll each round. It could be fairly easily done with cards that say "attack" "spell", or little white boards. But you declare first and when it gets to you all you can do is your action or maybe abort for a dodge? Rolling each round would keep it a huge mystery.

Crits = max damage. Doubling the dice is effectively max damage anyway, this would just speed things up.

The cuthroat world of D&D recruitment

So I'm apparently in a very odd place. A lot of people here are into DMing. A lot. Which makes it kinda awkward for a dude who wouldn't mind DMing if there were a good player base, but is also happy to play.

Thing is, these guys are pretty selfish in their desires. They want to run a particular setting or long-running campaign, but the reality of this desert is there's lots of temporary people with hit-or-miss schedules. There's also something to be said for pandering to your player base and at least running something they're into rather than your pet setting. But that's another topic.

One great thing about the game I was playing in was we played basically every Thursday night when we had 3+ players. Whoever could make it made it and we had some fun. There were a few times we cancelled and the DM wasn't the best at getting people up to speed or handling when people couldn't make it, but he tried.

Now at least three guys have tried to loot the ruins of my game without even understanding who was playing or what their motivations were. Two of them have divided up Thursday nights for an every other week campaign without thought for what campaign people want to play or how that doesn't work with the schedules of people who were playing on Thursdays.

There's also these mini-conventions here. One day, two sessions, about 3 times a year. I know I was kinda busy when they had the call for GMs, but they have 10 morning slots and 10 afternoon slots. Six of the GMs are running two sessions. So what could be 20 different GMs and different game styles to try boils down to only 14, and at least one of them is running the same thing morning and afternoon. There could be a good reason for having people run two, and maybe I missed something in the discussion.

This all adds up to people really wanting to run a game, and run their game though. Which is kind of a turn off.