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Yes, that's right. 9.5. I am if you hadn't inferred already by the title, in the Not a Fan club regarding 10th edition. It's not anything I believe can be fixed with a chapter approved or codex release. So I propose we do something like the D&D community did with 3.5 | Pathfinder. Working title Gramaticus. Cuz dude was a badass.
If you are onboard with 10th, please spare me your crybaby memes. I'm not burning or selling my army and I've had more than a few 7 course meals of anti-salt salt. Just not down with the changes. That being said, if this does sound like your cup o tea, the idea I had was a community collaboration for a re-working of 9th ed, getting rid of or fixing some of the things people actually want fixed. Maybe borrowing a few things from 10th that I feel are good changes like Battle-shock and removal of the Morale phase.
Here's what I'm thinking so far:

- Force Org stays at AoO version with 6 compulsory and 3 of any other unit type.
- Battle phases are Command, Move, Shooting/Psychic, Fight. Battle-shock works in place of Morale phase the similar to how it does in 10th with removing ability to use strats, perform actions,or obsec.
- Re-rolls, we love em right? No, we don't. Lethal Hits and Sustained hits is another part of 10th I think was actually a pretty solid idea. Re-roll wounds is replaced by exploding 6s and re-roll hits is replaced by +1 to overall hits on 6s.
- Psychic phase is rolled into the Shooting phase, but you can choose from a list of spells/attacks as in 9th instead of having a single or couple quite boring static psychic attacks.
- Codeces, Datasheets and points value remain the same, for now. But I am open to suggestions cuz yes, there is of course room for improvement. I play exclusively Death Guard (I know, shocker right?) so while I'm not intimately familiar with other armies, from what I've seen playing against, they're all fairly balanced with a few things that could use some tweaking here and there. For instance, I admit Tallyman getting 7 fold chant in both your and your opponent's Command phase is a bit much. Plus it's a crime that CSM finally got a good codex with little mini codeces for each legion and now it's reset time and everything is thrown out.
- Relics and Warlord Traits are still taken from faction codeces. If the plan was to slim the game down, these things are configured when building your army and don't take up any time from actual gameplay, other than the 30-60 seconds it takes to explain them to your opponent at the beginning of a 2-3 hour battle.
- Another thing I've heard people criticize 9th for that I can agree with is secondary objectives. They did get a bit out of hand with the faction specifics. Maybe limit it to 2 per faction.
- Obsec remains the same. If your unit has obsec, it gets the objective unless other units that also have obsec have more models or count for more models. OC is.. just weird. And I kinda hate it.
- Oh, also fly is still the same cuz feth that diagonal BS.

That's all I got for right now. It would be pretty cool if this actually became something and a good place to discuss how 9th can really be improved by actual suggestions from the community and not a flaming pile of memes and spongebob mocking font posts, but we'll see how it goes.
Ah hell, who am I kidding, this is GW. They probably have patent ninjas on ropes repelling to bust through my ceiling like Brazil as I'm typing this right now.

The problem is that 9th isn't fun and none of your proposed changes fix that. Also, how is OC weird. A single nurgling should't be able to hold an objective from a lot of things and now it cant..

Vastly prefer 10e spells though 9e psychic overall mechanism work is more interesting. But mw spam is very definition of boring psychic attacks. And 10e has plenty of interesting spells. Teleports, being hidden from long range shooting, buffing your squads attacks...beats mw spam any day.

Now problem with 10e psychic isn't spells(which are more fun than 9e roll bunch of dice for 2-3 mw. MW spam is boring) but that it's automatic without much of counter. No sense of dangerous power you have to control or you are in trouble.

Going away from mw in spells is one of the best decisions in 10e. MW spam spells should die.

Non-MW spells also allow for better separation between anti-horde spells, anti-elite spells and anti-horde spells. With MW best you can do is roll die for every model and on X+ MW. Which if on 6's basically is just lots of dice for smite against hordes and from above starts to become really oppressive real fast if you don't have anti-psychic against 1W units that just go poof.

if you wanted to a house rule based game that improved things you'd be better off just devising your own points list for upgrades. I think over all 10th looks the better system,

Yeah this was a terrible idea and I regret everything. Tried to delete the thread, but I guess I'm a boomer cuz I can't find the option. Please just let it get buried. I'll suck it up and learn 10th.

Oh tinkering with rules is never terrible idea and it would be better overall if more people would do so.

Though first up one would need to really think what you don't like in each edition and approach from there. If you are tinkering to begin with take bold steps.

(oh and obviously your gaming opponents need to be on board)

But for example from your list sounds like large part of your problems seems to be more of army build part in 10th. And that seems to be common enough theme. In that case maybe port 9e army build to 10e would be easier to begin with than 9e and mix 10e parts to it.

If I were to modify game that's route I would at least personally take.

But making game more to your taste is never terrible if you have gaming group that's cool with it. If you have such a group then odds are you get more enjoyment than if you stuck with pure whatever-edition you would play at.

 SickSick6 wrote:
Yeah this was a terrible idea and I regret everything. Tried to delete the thread, but I guess I'm a boomer cuz I can't find the option. Please just let it get buried. I'll suck it up and learn 10th.

I think for now this is not likely to gain much traction just because of how close 10th is to 9th. Your proposed changes even acknowledge that and bring them even closer. Voices that wanted to return to 5th edition really got a following when 7th died, because then there was a clear design change and not just bad patches that made the game worse (aka 6th and 7th Edition).
So, people who liked 9th will probably take 10th as an update that is good enough (obviously the OP doesn't though, but from the reactions I've read people rather move to OPR, HH or prior editions instead of just refining 9th... because 10th is just that, a refinement of 9th.)

 SickSick6 wrote:
Yeah this was a terrible idea and I regret everything. Tried to delete the thread, but I guess I'm a boomer cuz I can't find the option. Please just let it get buried. I'll suck it up and learn 10th.

I don't actually think it was a terrible idea, but I do think you'll generate more interest if you do something to fix 10th because it's what everyone is going to be focused on moving forward.

I found myself in a similar situation- I wanted to have an effective Imperial Agents resource, and I vastly prefer 9th to 10th. So when I contemplated how to create the resource Agents deserve, my instinct was to lean on 9th, which gave me SOOO much more to work with. I quickly realized, however, that if I did so, the only person interested in the resource would be me.

10th is so barebones, that it's really easy to fix. Really, points and combi-weapon fixes would solve 60-70% of the complaints I've seen.

But before I leave, I have to address one comment in the thread because I've seen it elsewhere:

tneva82 wrote:
Vastly prefer 10e spells though 9e psychic overall mechanism work is more interesting. But mw spam is very definition of boring psychic attacks. And 10e has plenty of interesting spells. Teleports, being hidden from long range shooting, buffing your squads attacks...beats mw spam any day.

Now problem with 10e psychic isn't spells(which are more fun than 9e roll bunch of dice for 2-3 mw. MW spam is boring) but that it's automatic without much of counter. No sense of dangerous power you have to control or you are in trouble.

Now originally, I was going to do a knee-jerk reaction and come out of the gate screaming about this, but upon reflection, I think it's better to just respectfully disagree. Here's why:

The only powers that caused MW in 9th were Witchfire powers, and from my cursory search of 4 dexes, I couldn't find a single discipline that had more than 2 Witchfire powers, and I found a Discipline that had ONE and another that had NONE.

Blessings buff- either a targeted unit, self, or as an aura effect. In tenth, I've never seen a blessing that had any other target except the unit to which the character is attached. So variety goes to 9th.

Maledictions debuff- either as a targeted unit, or as an aura effect. In 10th, I've only seen Maledictions that affect a target unit, and even those are far more rare than the proliferation of Witchfire and Blessing powers... So variety goes to 9th.

Finally, any power in 9th could be assigned to any unit, where in 10th, identical datasheets always get the same power; you'll never be able to give the power that a Termie Librarian can use to someone in power armour, or Gravis armour, or Spectrus armour... So again, variety goes to 9th.

And finally, there were anti-psychic armies in 9th, and various ways to represent that. I think 10th's only anti-psychic effect is a save vs MW... so again, surprising no one, variety goes to 9th. If you want to see how uninteresting anti-psyker is in 10th, compare 9th SoS to 10th SoS.

Now I'm going to try and be somewhat objective: there is more variety in 10th for WHEN psychic abilities happen, and I will say there's a chance that there are a wider variety of blessings (though not in ways of targeting them) and there might be more variety in the Witchfire powers too, since they may have multiple USR keywords.

But if all you ever faced off against in 9th was MW spam, that was your meta, not the rules GW wrote. I tended to pick mostly blessings for my Imperial psykers and mostly maledictions for my chaos psykers. If a unit got to pick two powers, I always made sure that one was a Witchfire power, but never both. Some of the dudes I played with prioritized Witchfire powers, but like me, if they got to choose more than one, they made sure their second was a blessing or a malediction.