I posted this on another thread, which kind of echos your ideas.

Trying to improve our game to help to sell it has been well debated, and here's some things I'd like to see in the future.
1) Refs to cut out all the fannying around at the play the ball.
Once held is shouted players must release or be penalised. There's too many ocassions of the ref shouting held, and the ball carrier then knocked to the ground.
Hands must be removed from the ball carrier on the shout of held.
Ball carrier must play the ball backwards, with his foot.
2) Refs to cut out all the fannying around at scrums.
Lets stop one team rushing to form a scrum to stop the clock and then disband, have a drink, tie shoelaces, check who's on I'm a Celebrity, attend to head wound, have another drink.
Put a clock on from when ref awards scrum to whichever side, and if a team is not packed down within 30 seconds (or whatever appropriate amount of time) then they're penalised.
Make scrums a proper contest again, and make everyone pack down properly. I know there was an attempt with scrum halves sent off for feeding, and then hookers for foot up, but this can't be impossible to solve.
3) Goal line drop outs, again taking a crazy amount of time for a drink, tie shoelaces, check who's on I'm a Celebrity, attend to head wound, have another drink. Get a clock on it, and if not done within the allotted time, then a penalty.
4) Next TV deal, get some advertising slots with the TV provider agreed for RFL use in marketing and selling the game/events.
5) Substitutes - we need to increase the amount that forwards are on the field of play during a game to try and give some space for backs to be creative. Could keep 4 subs but cut down the interchanges to eight or six. Were getting too many games where players are on from nought to ten minutes. Bit ironic with the OP, but were not American Football.
6) Make SL a 14 team competition playing each other home and away once. Keep the magic weekend if you have to, but that might be better served as a weekender for the last 8 or last 16 of the challenge cup.
Whoever is top of the league is crowned champions.
7) Item 6) then gives space for mid season international/representative rugby and end of season international tournament.
Move the challenge cup final away from the August bank holiday and the rail travel nightmare of getting to London. Also, allow more time from the semifinals to the final for the opportunity to sell this game.
9) Sky need a shake up, the presentation is stale, and the dissection of every tackle for possible infringements is boring and not what we want to hear. Just describe the action, please, and leave it there.
Do we really need this large cast of Eddie, Terry, Barry, Jon, Brian, Angela, Phil, Bill and Stuart (I bet I haven't named them all, either)
10) Great to see a GB tour back on, hope the Aussies will come over here too. These need to feature in a cycle of one home and one away every two years.
11) Get William and Kate or Harry and Meghan to present the Challenge Cup. Harry is patron of RFL, so he should be duty bound to do something to help promote our game.
There's other things I'm sure, and there's no doubt some better suggestions, but the bottom line is the game needs an overhaul.

My pet peeve is the 'fumble' interpretation of a ball that is lost backwards but ruled as a knock forward. It absolutely p****s me off to see the game stopped and a scrum given because a player has knocked the ball backwards, yet it happens time and again. I know some people think treating it as a 'fumble' penalises poor handling but that's not what is supposed to happen. As long as it's gone backwards I'd rather let both sets of players scramble for the loose ball than have an a technically unecessary scrum, the side making the error is penalised because they have to work harder to recover and the opposition gets a chance to either win possession or at least put some additional pressure on. I was watching the Wales v Scotland RU game on Saturday and I saw a ball get dropped backwards by Wales and the referee (correctly) ruled play on and the Welsh players scrambled to recover, and I said to my Dad in a SL game that would almost certainly have been rulled as a knock on despite it clearly going backwards.

One noticeable difference from an Aussie ref yesterday was that he allowed play to carry on when an England player was down injured in backplay. While there is a fine line between putting a team at a disadvantage when a player is genuinely injured, we would see a reduction in play acting and fake injuries if this was done more often.

We do that anyway. The only time we don’t is when play has already stopped, the injured player is in the way of the play, or it’s a head injury.

I don’t think there’s an issue with faked injuries during play, it’s when play has stopped that we have a problem.
Unfortunately now I think that we have to go down the football route, if a player needs the trainer/physio etc and play to be delayed then they should go off the pitch and not come back on for the next set of 6.

I don’t want to go down that route and there will be some legitimate injuries caught up in that unfairly but I don’t know of another way to discourage the faking of injuries that we currently see.

I think most agree the game needs speeding up. Though I’m not necessarily in the camp of ‘let’s do what the Aussies do’ I think they’ve made a few good changes recently.

1: Standardise the rules of the game throughout NRL, SL and internationals. Any future tweaks are agreed and implemented across all levels.

2: 2 referees, if this means loosing the VR and putting him on the field, so be it. See point 1.

3: Actually implement the rules, not an interpretation of. Ie when the ref calls held the players get of, not wait for the ref to be held then put the player to the floor then get off. If not it’s a penalty. With regard to this the refs need to call held sooner, as soon as forward momentum/being pushed back is stopped this will probably reduce offload but speed the PTB up. Attached must play the ball with the foot.

4: Shot clock, great innovation imo, see point 1.

5: Increase substitutes to 6, 2 of which must be club trained and under 21 at the start of the season and club trained. At the same time decrease substitutions to 8 per game.

6: Milking, let’s face it, every team and virtually every player are guilty of it to some extent. There was a great example in the test match. I think it was Hill who obviously made sure that he moved and played the ball directly into a player lying on the floor, tried to milk the penalty, ref ignored it resulting in Hill disadvantaging his own team. If the refs don’t give a penalty if they believe milking is involved the players will stop doing it.

As far as the rules go that’s a good start imo

If you are not a player, ref or actively attempting surgery on a fallen player you must not be on the pitch. Water should be available on the touch line. Stop coaches standing on the field of play directing players, in fact award extra points if the attacking team can trample underfoot anyone in a fluorescent bib on the pitch.