Thoughts and suggestions on medical department

[Egregorious]

an important element I think people are glancing over in this thread is how fun it is to be on the other side of these proposed doctoring changes

The way I see it, any changes need to account for two things: uninteractable time in medbay, and unavoidable time in medbay. You don't want players to have to wait long before being administered to, nor need to spend time in medbay despite having successfuly avoided harmful situations. This also accounts for your example where you kept getting semi-revived and presumably didn't have the option of observing properly or respawning because of it.

As long as those two things are limited - not necessarily avoided altogether - I think patients just have to suck it up, because there should be an impact for getting into trouble. Patient-doctor interactions are fun even if all you're doing as a doctor is telling them what sort of damage they've taken and what you're doing to fix them. I love telling my patients they have lacerations or bruising, especially if it prompts them to explain what caused it.

For instance the issue with flatly-applied cloning defects is that it causes those issues to scale with how often the cloning machine is used in succession. Which tends to mean that the highest number of cloning defects being generated are happening when medical doctors are already too busy to treat them, and thus just forces an extra queue onto patients. That's uninteractive time spent in the medbay - they're forced to just twiddle their thumbs until a doctor becomes available.

I think the easiest way that would cause the least issues to make medical doctor as a job more fun for experienced players would be to just give more options for healing

I do not think more options in a vacuum is going to accomplish anything. There are a bunch of extra, more advanced, options for dealing with damage which just never get used because the next most efficient thing after basic chems is cryo, and after that it's cloning. There's very rarely a need to go past that.

My favourite Goonesque medical mechanic is that the best toxin medication is homeopathic beer delivered straight to the veins; which not only do I think is hilarious, it also requires some imagination and setup. There are a lot of advanced doctoring techniques that rarely get used because you'll be fighting a losing battle against other doctors who just want to stick someone in cryo or in the cloning machine since it's just as if not more efficient than what you're doing. More options in a vacuum won't alleviate that; they'd need to be better options to be interesting, which is hard to do because of the current efficiency of the more basic mechanics.