At the level of various scripts, patches, etc., I can also suggest a lot of things to balance it out

no-no-no ... I wrote that for the future and without any irony or lack of justification.
asm is already making the first version of the patch for SoD and seems to have almost finished the simultaneous turn feature up to 116, so in subsequent versions I think it won't be problematic to play around with diplomacy as well.
In any case, the transition to new rules will be gradual.
At the moment, what Lider1 proposed + a random starting hero is relevant.

P.S. Is it worth creating a new thread for voting or can the mods squeeze a poll into this thread?
About 6-10 positions are needed and 3 answer options for each:
- for
- against
- abstained