Haha, yeah exactly.
To weigh in on the actual stuff being discussed more, though, I don't massively like the penalty shoot-out, but I'm yet to hear an idea that I like more than it.
I kind of accept that the tie-breaker has to be something that is not regular run-of-play football for the exact reason that I linked in my previous post, and nothing else quite makes sense more than a turn-based goal-scoring contest. Making it about anything other than scoring goals would be tedious or ridiculous (no-one is going to hang around to watch a competition to ping a 50-yard ball the most accurately to the centre circle, for instance) and while it feels a little unfair basing it around a skill that only one of the four primary roles on the field specialises in, scoring goals is at least the very central tenet of the game so it makes sense, plus you could argue that scoring goals is something midfielders and goalkeepers have something to say about anyway, so it only really penalises defenders (some of whom can be among the most effective peno takers anyway). Any attempt at mixing the shoot-out up to be multi-discipline by adding in other contests to appeal to the other roles on the field would just be convoluted IMO.
As for the idea of expanding the idea of a penalty in the shoot-out to include say, dribbling, defenders and so on would surely not work. The idea of a 2-attacker, 1-defender, 1-goalkeeper set-up should in any sort of normal competition produce an even higher success rate than the current ~70% scoring rate in penalties (even my elementary FIFA skills have taught me just how easy it is to score in these situations) while adding even more players to either side runs the serious risk of turning each penalty into a canned, cut-down form of the 11-man defending-on-the-18-yard-line parking of buses which you already see enough in mismatched games, with the attackers spending literal minutes uncertainly passing the ball around the outside of the defensive line while probing slowly for the one time a defender steps out of line.
Worse, if this were to become a real thing it would be rigorously drilled by managers, meaning that the defenders would become far, far less likely to make mistakes. It would also go some way towards increasing the success rates of the better teams over the weaker, whereas one of the joys of a penalty shoot-out between teams from different divisions right now is that the blowing of the final whistle in stoppage time signals the end of the better team's natural advantage in ability - the penalty shoot-out is so random and hard to train perfectly for that the underdog's chances of winning suddenly jump up to almost exactly 50%.
The other thing I would add is that - and I am not judging this to be a bad thing, only pointing it out - I feel like any expansion of a penalty shoot-out to include more players active at once would make the plays immediately reminiscent of the kind of attack-v-defence gameplay you see in such sports as ice hockey and basketball. Again - I am not arguing that this is a bad thing. It is in some ways an interesting dynamic, and I can't dispute that both of these sports are renowned for producing fast scoring with this style. However, outside of the US and a handful of other territories, these sports aren't widely watched/played nor well-regarded, and I think that implementing this idea would immediately strike the majority of non-Americans as the Americanisation of the penalty shoot-out, which would likely make these suggestions highly unpopular in places such as Europe and could threaten to reintroduce a scenario where football in the US is played to a different set of rules to that of other countries.
tl;dr - penalty shoot-outs are the lesser of 150,000 evils
Gotham Gator - you can't still feel the same about MLS scheduling when you see 90 players called up for international duty. That means you're talking about roughly 40% of the starting lineups are gone. And trophies are being decided within the margins of these results. It's ASININE.
