DBCowboy:
Still here, haven't played HERO in a couple years. Honestly found PbP to be a challenge for combat.
This is a big part of it, and has influenced my own game design and also my preferences to a large degree. When combats can take weeks in PBP, they just kill momentum I've found. Even in tabletop sessions, where they can take hours, eventually it becomes un-fun for me. Some of this is down to the way some games work. HERO is great for making stuff. It's like a fun minigame in and of itself. I feel that most of its crunch is actually front-loaded. However, there's still too much in the actual gameplay, which is becoming more and more of a dealbreaker for me.
I don't want to go full narrativist systems, necessarily. PbtA games aren't my favorite. But I feel there's a sweet spot there. Cortex Plus Heroic was kind of close to it. I feel like making HERO more viable from the perspective of accessibility would be stripping back some of the details, and certainly making post-chargen gameplay faster and easier with more narrative options, but without necessarily sacrificing all the stuff that makes it what it is.
I have one game I'm already working on, so no time to try to come up with something for this, but eventually I'd love to do something with a supers engine. Really, I'd love to see a sort of "HERO Lite" that kept some of the detail but embraced some looser, more broad game units and streamlined gameplay, too.
Almost all of my play is by PBP these days. If a game bogs down in certain areas, such as in combat or something, it makes it very hard to keep momentum going, and in PBPs, momentum is everything. Lose it and your game is typically sunk.