People might cry about being gimped and have no incentive to proceed with that. I played a Fallout death alternative mod that was kind of interesting, it took your attributes away like we do, but you earned them back with xp. So the sooner you got off your ass and got some action in, you restored your attributes, kind of simulating getting better from an illness once you get out of bed and start acting normal, you start feeling normal. So rather than wait it out, you got rid of it by doing stuff, which is probably better than a timer.
The thing is, if we keep spinning circles redesigning everything constantly, we'll never make any real headway on bandits and lots of people probably think the death penalty is just fine. Its old to you and me, so changing it sounds enticing but often you can get into a loop of tweaking things constantly and not make any real progress and the solution is to just step away. I burn out on Skyrim and no mod can fix it, only time spent away.