tl;dr If you want a comparative gameplay example, see game 'Infested Planet'. You control few, sturdy units- up against waves of enemies. Death is not a, well, death sentence- but a hindrance. Your soldiers can shrug off a few hits, and you're less focused on tactical perfection

I get DK caters primarily to a hardcore tactical audience but I want to take a step back and look at the game's mechanics as a foundation with a solid gameplay loop that could hold much more.

For the sake of this analogy, if DK2 was compared to FPS's, it has a health/damage ruleset akin to Insurgency. It has a hardcore ruleset.

I think a mod would be cool that ups the player controlled health pool so you can mow through waves of enemy soldiers with less risk to individual units. More akin to tactical multi-unit Halo, or tactical multi-unit Half-Life- a more casual ruleset that allows player controlled units to tank multiple or many hits before dying - and fighting against large waves of enemies.

Your units could theoretically be revived, use medkits on the field, or even have a regenerating or overshield/armor aspect to them.

Who wouldn't want to control a team of Master Chiefs and Gordon Freemans? I know I would.

I envision combining the current branches together in combat, so the SWAT team act as your 'grunts' that die quickly and respawn quickly- while the PMCs and CIA are your special units that carry your strategy. I particularly think the CIA would be especially fun to operate under more forgiving rules.

The modes would be less 'singular objective' based and instead are about establishing a stable loop.

Examples include escorting multiple hostages one by one- across a map of constantly respawning enemies. Or escorting one super tanky unit with expendable SWAT units, or defending a zone from incoming enemies for a set amount of time, or attacking a VERY tanky objective, balancing between focusing on attacking the objective and neutralizing incoming threats. Or moving through and capturing multiple control points. Usual arcade stuff.