not only do i think that it's likely that someone can come up with a rule change that improves chess, but i think it's probably way way easy to do
1) First, you'd need to state what "Improvement" means.
- More fun to spectate?
- More fun to play at low levels?
- More fun for the SuperGMs?
"Better for everybody" is an unattainable goal by any means, and that leaves the question whether eg "More fun for casual players, and more spectator friendly; but less interesting for people in the 2500+ rating range" would be an 'Improvement' or a Deterioration.
2) Then, you need some way to find out what exactly is "wrong" with the game that eg makes it a lousy spectator sport - and keep the first question in mind.
Is there a problem in SuperGMs drawing 50% of their games? The SuperGMs don't have an issue with it, for people playing at lower levels it's irrelevant because *their* games aren't 50% draws -- so you're changing the game for the people who don't play it; potentially alienating the playerbase for the sake of armchairfarters?
3) Third, you need to come up with an idea of how to fix it. Up to here was already a mammoth amount of work ("way way easy", really??), now good luck with that idea!
4) Fourth, you need an exceptional amount of match practice (at all levels! and with specators! and stuff!) to check whether your change actually fixes said "problem", and whether it does so without creating a new, possibly bigger one.
To take the example from before: Eg maybe Kingwalk-rule is a lot more entertaining and reduces draws, but does so by moving all the draws to the White-win side; so the game changes from "30% W / 50% D / 20% B" to "50% W / 30% D / 20% B" - is this really better?
Or maybe you create a highly complicated rule which makes GM chess more interesting, but heightens the entry bar for playing the game by so much that the entire casual playerbase is either left confused, attempts to understand it and drops the game, or ignores it altogether which leads to two vastly different games being played between lower and higher ranks.
5) Lastly, you have to check what your change actually DOES to the game.
You know, there is already a super-simple solution which accomplishes the following:
- Much more fun to watch I: You can actually follow a game proper
- Much more fun to watch II: More exciting gameplay!
- Greatly lessens the amount of (usable) opening preparation
- Lowers the amount of draws (without greatly increasing White's winning chances)
- Vastly broadens the amount of arising position types / pawn structures / etc
- Probably more!
And all this, without touching the actual chess rules whatsoever! How??
.. Faster Time Controls.
Less time to think means:
- Sacrifices/Pawnstorms/etc become stronger (and thus are chosen more often), as attacking is easier than defending
- You can sit down at your PC and follow an entire game NP (rather than this being a 6h sitting)
- Blunders! (exciting!)
- Time Trouble! (exciting!)
- Opening Prep becomes comparably irrelevant, as you don't have the time to think about which reaction was the right one to deviation X
- Positional manoeuvring and boring prophylaxis take a notable backseat, as that's much harder to do when you can't get a proper view of all your opponent's possible plans
- "Incorrect" Openings become much harder to refute (and are thus chosen more frequently), leading to games becoming more different from each other
etc!
But how does all of this happen? Because people are plain playing worse. They have less time to think, so instead of their usual 2700+ level they "only" play like say a 2400 would (during long time controls).
So, you "fixed" "all of chess' problems" by making the games less perfect and more prone to mistakes. Is that really something you want? *
* For the record: I could see FIDE going this way, and I'm not sure what I would think of it.