Value in consistency?

When Chief Montagna and I were creating the most recent sim, the Taxpayer fire, we discussed a few different options related to making the sims consistent. This forum gives us the opportunity to hear your views!

The first thing we talked about was having a pike pole or not. We originally used keystrokes to vent the windows/doors, but then we thought it might be more immediate to include the pike pole.

Having opted for the pike poke, we discussed whether one should be able to vent through windows and doors from any view--we ultimately decided to only allow this from directly in front of the store fronts. The rationale was that if we allowed venting the liquor store from the A-B corner (since that is foremost in the view), but not the pizzeria or realtor, then it might confuse users who were trying to knock out the other windows that are visible. However, you can vent the roof from any position, and also engage the saw.

In terms of keystrokes, we started thinking that perhaps we ought to have a common vocabulary of keystrokes, for example, 'v' for victim, 'h' for h***, even though the scenarios can be quite different. We talked about 'v' for venting, but then realized we used up 'v' in the wood frame sim for our victim. We have used the 'x' key for 'all clear' and the 'r' key for reset, but that is about as consistent as we've made things.

Anyone have some suggestions about making the sims more consistent, going into the future?