I do not think anything of making local less reliable. It helps me to decide whether I want to take an engagement because I see a chance of winning with what I have at hand, or better get safe because I have better things to do than to feed my tools needlessly and without any chance of getting a good outcome for me.
Delay is irrelevant to me as long as I see reliably who is in local. It doesn’t matter much to me if the people in system show up in chat with a short delay as long as I see all people in system.
That is one suggestion that keeps getting brought up and no one has yet solved the impossible balance issues: If you give sov holders these tools, will they get local only for themselves, thus making it incredibly hard for neutrals and hostiles to hunt local residents (which is not desireable), or will it give local to all people but then sov holders fund the intel tools of neutrals and hostiles who hunt them (which is undesireable as well).
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Here’s another suggestion: You can opt out of showing up in local via a module but since local chat is tied to the fluid router network of the gate network, you have to disconnect yourself from that network. That means that you won’t be able to get into a new, current clone should you get podded because you are not connected to the network that handles these mind transfers.
To make the disconnection from the network, you have to activate the module before you jump a gate/wormhole. Once you activated that module, you won’t show up in local chat in the next system. In order to restore the connection to the network, you have to change system again via a gate (wormholes could work as well since you have to jump into w-space and back to make it work which has a polarization delay which prevents you from simply going back and forth repeatedly) or dock in a station/structure. This limitation is there to prevent people from turning off the module mid fight so that they can safe their clone, which would remove the risk that such a huge benefit should carry. Clone insurances would prevent complete loss of SP.
There you have it: Local shenanigans but with an appropriate risk for the incredible benefits that you gain. And only people who want to hunt like that would need to get a clone insurance as all other people are connected to the gate network that handles the mind transfers upon death, which means only the people who want to engage in this activity are impacted by this change and no one else, which prevents unnecessary, frustrating burdens for everyone else. A well designed gameplay feature, unlike most things CCP does these days. 