Might as well make the character and the horse untargetable while mounted since nobody is going to be knocking people off horses after this change.

With all these changes, who is even going to flag up and risk the hefty penalties? It seems rather pointless to maintain the ability to have non-mutual combat in the open world. Why not just change the system so that both parties have to flag up to enable open world combat? Seems like a much simpler change than these alterations to the broken and unfair karma system.

There are permared players. If people feel like doing these things, they can play as one. The life of a criminal was never meant to be easy, but some people still prefer that, so let them have it but with the severe penalties of being red. People want roleplay, let them roleplay.