I feel that gearing the game towards bite-size play sessions and gamers who have limited (and hence arguably more valuable) free time would be detrimental to the experience. If you're a responsible grown-up or student who can't spend four+ hours having a virtual adventure free of interruptions and responsibilities, I'd like you to consider chalking this one up as a loss, enjoy other people's stories and video highlights and not try to impose your own requirements on what direction DayZ should head down.
Or, put another way, I think what makes this game so interesting (both from a player- and 'viewer'-perspective) are those things that, at its core, *make* this a game that's not for everyone. I worry that 'improving' the game so that it's more accessible and immediate might be the very thing which de-emphasises its curious sparkle.
Even a 4-hour adventure might be fine with me. It's the "spend 1-2 hours attempting to find your friend and hoping you don't get particularly unlucky before the adventure starts" that makes it feel more of a grind than an adventure. Of course, some might consider the experiences of Beast and me (blunder in the night attempting to find a highway sign) to be adventures in themselves, and I suppose that's another viewpoint. =P
As as interested person who purchased the game and is playing the mod, I think it's fair for me to share my opinion for what direction the game should go, the same as other players. *shrug* An ideal situation would seem to be that some servers would have hardcore options (first person only, you get banned for 2 weeks if you die, etc.), some might have day only, some might have 4x day/night cycles, and so forth. In Minecraft there are survival servers, battle servers, there's the singleplayer easy mode, and there's the singleplayer hard mode where not only do you lose your player and gathered materials, but you lose everything you've BUILT. Having dedicated servers with configurable options is a strength of PC games, and I don't see a problem with leveraging that to allow players such as yourself to enjoy games on specific servers without all players being forced to have the same rule set.
Regarding server events, they would already seem to be possible to an extent judging by the "everybody is a bird" or "everybody flies into the air and/or dies" shenanigans by admins thus far.
And as for weapons spawning, it'd be like Hunger Games! Mad rush for equipment!