OK, so to reframe what I said in my opening post, these are the changes I'd like to see to the Camping Mechanic, going forward:
1) Unless you make a point of traveling to your full campsite, all Long-rests should be in the Mini-camp format.
2) Unless you're at your full campsite-you should only get access to the characters currently in your party. The only exception being if one of your other followers has some narratively vital dialogue to share with the player.
3) The scarcity of supplies & cost of Long-rests definitely needs to be seriously re-jigged. The cost of long-rests, as you increase levels, should definitely increase at a much higher rate, and the Supply Value of various items should probably be significantly reduced-& perhaps the gold cost of supplies purchased from Merchants. Perhaps the ability to consume food to regain small amounts of hit-points could also return, to force players to balance the need for long rests versus an immediate hit-point boost.
4) Mini-camps should hold at least some risk of being interrupted by "location appropriate" random encounters....again to further reduce any temptation to spam the long-resting system.
5) I concur with those who are saying that we require a proper Day/Night cycle where time advances-with short, partial and full rests obviously advancing the clock more rapidly. I don't know about anyone else here, but it would be cool to explore some of these outdoor locations at Night.
6) I also agree that we should get a more "permanent" base of operations, but not until Act 2.
7) Lastly, I do still hold that it would be nice to have some additional Optional Difficulty Settings-like a Fatigue system that forces you to take some kind of rest every X in-game hours, or suffer penalties, and/or a minimum supply requirement for even taking a partial rest. As I said, though, this would be Optional settings for the truly hard-core players, not part of the core rules.
