dexonsmith: I think that this site is great, and I appreciate all the work you do here. I used to play 9x9 on Yahoo Games in 2002, and this interface is much better in innumerable ways.
With that said, as you suggest, there still may be room for improvements in the course of time. Eventually, if computers increasingly pave out theoretical wins from move 1 with 6.5 komi for white, and with 5.5 komi for black, I hope that you will consider adding a new ruleset along the lines of the one used by the katago opening book that hexahedron mentioned: “Using Japanese-like rules, komi 6.”
Perhaps this isn’t a mode that you’ll add today or tomorrow, but I hope that you will get to it sooner or later, if that’s where the data keep pointing. In general, I think it’s more fun to have a game that doesn’t lead to a theoretical win either for white or for black given perfect play: That is, I think that if you play perfectly, you should at least be able to earn a draw.
I’m not quite sure how close we are to perfect play now (and I probably wouldn’t be the right person to ask about that anyway), but I suspect we are closer for 9x9 than we are for 19x19, and that we’ve gotten a lot closer over the past few years with the advent of AlphaGo, AlphaZero, and comparable computer-go programs. Don’t you think? And even when we are imperfect humans playing against other imperfect human, there is something comforting about knowing that the game isn’t inherently tilted against us, regardless of our starting color. I might be unnecessarily ignorant about the other rulesets available (like New Zealand, or Tromp-Taylor), so maybe I should look into that…
And last, to clarify why I care in the first place, I just want to say that I think 9x9 go is a great game in itself: better for those among us with not-so-long attention spans, and deserving of whatever high-grade analytical attention it can get.