On the "armory" part of your suggestions, check out
Fort Joy needs another floor - it's relevant.
I did notice that burning surfaces were nerfed, but it wasn't too much of a bother for me in the early stages of the game.
The improved level HP scaling seems to somewhat address our concerns about the magisters being too easy to beat in Fort Joy as well. That being said, you still couldn't beat a group of them at Level 1 or 2 - will have to see whether putting them down at Level 3 is still a breeze.