Outlaws of Thunder Junction Rules with Nelson 

Every LGS should be, I know mine has been.

This makes a ton of sense

But Ninjas, for the most part, serve a lord. Just because they are deadly and sneaky like Rogues doesn't mean they have the same moral backgrounds.

Apparently they were considered for the batching, but ninjas are too rare and also too plane-specific, and they don't want batches to be more than 5 things at most.

I think they're trying to avoid returning to where Rogues were terrorizing Standard because they gave them comparatively a lot of "is unblockable" type effects. The core design of tapping creatures to attack is meant to allow representation of that "away from base doing crimes/espionage/violence" stuff as that back and forth of crime vs crime. It's why the new Red Mercenary Token has a Sorcery-speed tap ability: they want your outlaws to team up when they're going out, and that's when your own stuff is less guarded. One of the few times when they coulda brought back "horsemanship" flavorfully, and (thankfully) they didn't.

The issue with having it as a set theme is that, other than Fish and Merfolk, most everything else that is commonly grouped tend to be really big, making it harder to do a whole set theme around them. At least with Outlaws each of those types can easily be found on small creatures at all points in the mana curve.

Since you Plot cards faceup, if you were to Plot a double faced card with something like the new Fblthp then you would just put them in exile faceup like any other card. It's not like Foretell where you put it in exile facedown.

Everything is Kicker... Or Horsemanship. 😂

Entwine, like Escalate, are limited by their inherent requirement that all effects need to be roughly equivalent in terms of their power since all modes require the same costs. Spree allows for a lot more variation in what kinds of effects they can combine by allowing varying costs for each mode.

None of the new mechanics seem any more complex than anything we’ve gotten before. Actually, all of them are just variants of mechanics we’ve seen before. idk what ur complaining about

Just in the general sense of new mechanics existing. If you actually read what they do, they are very basic and easy to understand if you have even a passing familiarity with Magic. Spree is just another variation on Escalate/Entwine/Kicker. Saddle is even less complex than Crew and just lets you tap creatures to give a creature a bonus. Outlaws are just the latest creature types matter theme. The only kind of complex thing is Crimes just because it's not something we've cared a ton about in the past, but it's still something that is explained on the cards and is just "did you do this basic game action that Magic does all the time?"