I design games and have been working on a Red Riichi variant where one of each number is red and this drives scoring instead of all the myriad of Yaku. All the Yaku are hard for beginners to onboard and a lot of hands have to good path to an interesting Yaku and just depend on luck to be able to call Riichi. I'm still testing it but I find it more interesting.

I also have a card game version that implements some of these ideas (although it doesn't have a Furiten concept).