The most consistent piece of playtest feedback I've been getting on Space Gerbils is that the Action Phase sucks, on two counts:

1. Blowing your roll in the Action Phase can retroactively make the Operations Phase minigame feel pointless, and there isn't really any provision for addressing runs of bad luck; some playtest groups routinely managed to whiff a 15/16 chance of success three or four cycles in a row, which makes the whole engagement grind to a halt, and there isn't an obvious way to mitigate that when an entire round of prep work boils down to a single roll of the dice.
    
   
2. The first point feeds into the second: the Operations Phase has its positional minigame, and the Fallout Phase has those lovely lookup tables, but then Action Phase hanging out between them is kind of nothing, mechanically speaking. Many players have reported that it feels like the Action Phase ought to have a minigame as well, and that it's incongruous for the portion of the phase cycle where stuff actually happens to be the least mechanically engaging.

There've also been reports, where drafts 0.1 and 0.2 would often become unplayable due to the play grid filling up with broken stations, drafts 0.3 and 0.4 have swung too far in the opposite direction and made complications too easy to mitigate. It's unclear whether this is due to the Action Phase's mechanics not throwing complications frequently enough, or due to the Fallout Phase not assessing those complications harshly enough; probably it's a mix of both.

Fortunately, the game's modular nature means that it's actually fairly trivial to rip out the current Action Phase procedures and replace them with something else; very little of the rest of the system would have to change. The trick is figuring out what that should look like.

The most obvious routes involve introducing individual actions in the Action Phase, but that's exactly what we don't want; mechanically, because we just made each gerbil perform a tactical action in the Operations Phase, and doing it twice in a row would double the handling time of an already ponderous system; and thematically, because acting "as" the gerbils' singular assumed persona after doing all that setup as individuals is kind of the whole point!

In balance, this is a good problem to have, because I enjoy designing stupid minigames.

As for what that hypothetical Action Phase minigame might look like, I keep coming back to the idea of taking a page from Gone to Hell and formalising the presently-optional rule that the players should take turns "being" the bounty hunter persona in each Action Phase. That would definitely help with sorting out the forthcoming rules for GMless play, since the players whose "turn" it isn't could step into the encounter management roll. However, that leaves the off-turn players twiddling their thumbs every Action Phase in GMful play, which in turns means either having two separate sets of Action Phase procedures for GMful and GMless play, or biting the bullet and making Space Gerbils exclusively GMless, neither of which terribly appeals.

This post is mostly just me thinking out loud, so I don't expect anyone to have an opinion, but as always, I'm open to suggestions!