Endgame Deaths

I've been dwelling over endgame and the punishment of death. It's been nothing but frustrating as a new player, so much so that I am taking a break from PoE2 endgame for the time being, until positive changes are made. That said, I do think there is potential for change here, not just for PoE2, but for PoE1 as well.

Portals
In PoE1, you get 6 portals that you can use for any reason you wish, whether that is returning to deposit items or because you died. In PoE2, you only use those portals to deposit or refill flasks, and dying removes all portals and deletes the map. To me, this kinda makes it feel like just giving the player 6x inventory space would negate half of the reason to even have portals in PoE2 in the first place.

Pinnacles and Citadels
The primary goal of endgame is reaching and completing these extremely rare/grindy encounters. Citadels are extremely hard to find, and pinnacle access tokens are expensive and grindy. Then you only get one chance at them before you need to luck into/grind for a replacement.

Risk = Reward
Endgames central design in both games is increase your risk with map affixes to increase your rewards. What would be the biggest risk a player could take? Removing their own chances at a map. The one thing I hear that motivated the change to "death = no portals" is that dying in PoE1 meant nothing as you had 5 more chances. This system just punishes new players/characters who aren't geared up enough to ace maps.

A Possible Solution
Why not take the idea of risk = reward and apply it to the portals too? Remove portals for better currency drop rates? Remove portals for increased chance of the boss dropping their unique? This lets new players experience the content at their own rate but lets veterans take higher risk for even better gains. This also has the potential to remove the need for +Rarity, as players can use better defensive gear to survive in these riskier encounters. This could even retroactively apply to PoE1. It would probably require nerfing drop rates at first, but could improve the experience in the long run.