Tone-wise, I prefer to run my L5R games less like animation, and more like a Kurosawa film with more open displays of supernatural elements. Not saying this is the best way, but it makes the most sense to me as an expression of what makes a *samurai* fantasy different from any other fantasy.

Let's be clear. In L5R, Bushido and honor are fictional code of conducts inspired by the way of life of an ancient Japanese warrior caste which was greatly exaggerated by the Japanese governement during WWII in order to increase the support of the population towards the war effort.
 
There is no clear cut answer when it comes to these concepts. Our personal interpretation greatly influence how we analyze these elements and none of them is inherently bad. This is a fictional universe and while I totally enjoy such discussion, an argument that can be summarized as: ''This is how it works'' is flawed because there is no definitive answer.''
 
Give us in-universe examples and justifications rather than forcing your own point of view. For example, ''we can define Duty like this because this samurai which was a paragon of Duty acted that way'' is a reasonable explanation.
 
I'm not saying you are wrong, but in its current state, your argument is defined by your opinion and, unless proven otherwise, has no basis in facts.

That's why we have a reboot  . 
 
Otherwise, the Shugenja (and the Monks) supposedly adhere to the Shintao exclusively, because that's the way they attain the spiritual harmony they absolutely require to do Shugenja stuff. I'm not exactly sure how you can add Bushido to the mix considering that the guy who invented Bushido in-setting specifically admitted that following the Bushido or the Shintao are mutually exclusive. It just kinda' goes back to how the Shugenja should be priests and not samurai who throw fireballs instead of swinging katanas (and by doing so, they totally overshadow the katana-swinging samurai even though I guess players play L5R for the katana-swinging and not for the fireball throwing). 
 
 
 
I mean, for mechanical effects, they would still have "Honor" in roughly the same 0.0-10.0 system, but it would represent their adherence to the Shintao and not to the Bushido. 

I'd like to see japanese terms used properly, like gozoku for example.
 
I'd like to see the clans developed in deep around their traditions and territories and not around one or two archetypes like the shinobi-Bayushi, the berserk-Hida, the author's-waifu-utaku ecc.
 
I'd like to see a better representation of Merenae and Tharane in order to better include them as visitors or enemies, like it was done for Yobanjin; I don't need a school for them, just advises to play them as PC or NPC.
 
It is not need that everything have a school, but everything need a good description.
 
I'd like to see Shirabyoshi.
 
Seppuku wasn't the sole punishment for a samurai, there was also the loss of the family name for example.
 
[Oh, yeah, I'd like to see resolved the "problems" with the matriarchal clans, exspecialy the Utaku, I still don't know how the Utaku females convince the nomads to marry them (buy they the boys?) and what are the rules for males, they can't attend to other schools, I don't think the clan let them leave their family via marriage either]

I have previously issued my objection to the way schools work in the L5R RPG and as I have been reviewing them more carefully lately, I really got to say that it reinforced my previous stance even though I was totally open to having my mind changed.
 
I really don't believe that any clan is without archers, without cavalry, without scouts, without duelists...
 
And that is what makes L5R RPG schools so problematic. That there was this whole overemphasis on every school at every rank doing something uniquely different and being overly specialized in one particular thing. It wasn't that you follow a school and that means your defenses get enhanced at one rank, your damage abilities at another, your attacks at another, your versatility at yet another....
 
No, the schools were designed in such that if the school was about enhancing your defenses, that's about all it ever did. If it was about enhancing your initiative, it did so and then gave you insane offensive bonuses for doing so. If it was about offensive, then all ranks were built around offense.
 
And, again, every school seemed to be desperately reaching to try to be uniquely different. So the schools that were designed first got the most basic, simple, streamlined mechanics to do what they wanted to do-- and then if a school was designed later, it was given some convoluted and over-complicated way of trying to reach the same effect and often failing to do so.
 
And if, as everything outside of looking at the RPG's mechanical limitations suggests, that every clan actually has people filling all those various necessarily military roles so they are fielding a decent army (not to even begin to mention the courtier schools and how many fill a role a clan only needs a few of while ignoring jobs that need to be done on a more consistent basis) then I really got to wonder.....
 
Maybe no samurai are meant to have any school ranks at all. It is the only way we can possibly justify anyone but a Kakita ever winning the Topaz championship or **** near any duel for that matter... and unless one is a Tsuruchi, then they cannot possibly be a decent archer if the average school rank was 3. And the Unicorn are the only ones via the rules of the RPG who are ever going to have or be able to afford a horse of any kind ever...

Fundamentally, the reason why this whole "what school rank should the average samurai have" is basically impossible to answer is that the RPG, at least in terms of the way it handles schools, is such an extraordinarily poor representation of the world it is meant to represent that the whole thematic concept of the world as it is supposed to be kind of starts to fall apart once you assume that even rank 1 of these limited number of schools that in no way duplicate each other is common and the more school ranks you assume everyone has, the more the whole world just utterly falls apart under the weight of these exclusive and pigeon-holing overpowered school techniques.
 
That being said-- it is important that your PCs face actual challenges and so however powerful your PC are, it is important that they face a challenge capable of countering them... that being said, if your PCs have entirely min/maxed their way towards being massively overpowered in one particularly aspect of the game as the poorly constructed schools encourage, if not enforce, your PCs to do-- it usually leaves them with some massively gaping weakness that can be exploited by NPCs with relatively few actual school techniques.

At the very beginning of L5R, Rokugan was a patriarchal society in a way much similar to Medieval Japan. To compensate, they created matriarchal families for female characters. 
 
Not long after, they scrapped much of the sexism in the setting, but kept the matriarchal families. They also tried to tone down the disparity between males and females in these familiies, but ended up with a weird system in which it is unclear how everything works

First, understand that since you are dealing with the Mantis-- nothing can make sense.
 
The Mantis Clan really shouldn't exist as it is presented.
 
The Moshi were literally a group of shugenja that were overseeing one tiny little village on the coast in the mountains that pretty much everyone had forgotten existed. Yes, they were matriarchal... there were also only a couple dozen members.
 
The Tsuruichi were even worse, they literally consisted of 1 guy and his 6 retainers. They had literally just been dubbed a family a few years before. They probably shouldn't have even had a proper school since Tsuruichi had clearly been trained by someone else and none of his retainers had been trained by him, so there was no possible way they could have set up some sort of unique school with its own special traditions... yet they remain the only skilled archers in all of the land within the RPG because of the screwy school system.
 
Honestly, it was only because these families were given names and it was decided that Yoritomo's Alliance/the Mantis Clan was made a Great Clan and those were a couple of the actual named families that were part of it-- so instantly the membership of their family was retconned to be probably more than 50x what it had previously been. We are supposed to believe this happened by just untold numbers of Mantis Clan members swearing fealty to those families rather than the Yoritomo family, but... really... even as the largest Minor Clan, there never should have been remotely enough Mantis Clan members to equal the size of a single Great Clan family. Yet, somehow, after the Mantis Clan literally split themselves into thirds to fill out those families that had very few previous members, their actual size didn't seem to shrink at all as a result. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people, just appeared out of the ether and grew those families to rival Great Clan families instantaneously.
 
Point is, that up until the Mantis Clan was made a Great Clan and their membership was retconned in a single generation to suddenly be as large as any other Great Clan family, there were so few Centipede Clan members that you could write the name of every single member who had ever been part of the clan and you could fit it all onto one page with about 3 columns. And that would be everyone who had ever been part of the clan.
 
With a group that small, not much could be said about their traditions. They probably had the freedom to deal with everything on a case-by-case basis. That being said, given that they were described as a clan of female fire shugenja, it is reasonable to suspect that there were almost no male shugenja in their entire history (which, again, we aren't even talking among 150 people spread across several generations).
 
But once their family suddenly jumped to 50x its previous size within a couple years without any really good explanation, they clearly allows males to be shugenja. While it is understood that much like the Matsu and Utaku they actively discriminate against males to a degree no clan discriminates against females (one of those odd things that popped up in so many RPGs in the 90s where you remove sexual discrimination as much as possible from something and then put in sexual discrimination against men in one family or clan or tribe or nation), it quite clearly isn't to nearly the same degree as the Utaku or Matsu.... or, just as likely, someone forgot that the Moshi were supposed to be a female-first family when making the artwork and character names and ended up accidentally printing male Moshi shugenja and just kept doing it.
 
But, again, whatever Matriarchal traditions existed within the comparatively tiny group that had called themselves Centipede Clan before their time was probably completely nullified when they had just a massive influx of adult members who had their own training and background and traditions so that the Moshi had to ultimately adjust and be much more like the Mantis who now made up the vast overwhelming majority of their family.

The Monkey Clan is an exceptional exception. It was made very, very clear that if anyone had sniffed out Toku's outright lies and deceptions, he would have been killed by any honorable samurai on the spot. Ultimately he was only spared by imperial decree granting him a high enough status and protection to save him if the truth were to ever come out.
 
But any non-samurai caste person who engaged in warfare or hold a sword is supposed to be summarily executed on the spot without question. They absolutely cannot join any clan-- ever. This is a concrete rule within the setting that has been reiterated many times.
 
The Mantis are not meant to have any gaijin among their ranks. If they do, they live by deception and subterfuge disguising their real heritage. The Moto alone stand as the sole exception to this rule and were accepted only under significant protest in order to bring the Kirin back to the empire. Otherwise, had they been encountered by the people of Rokugan under any other circumstance than the Kirin at their most vulnerable and desperate, they would have been entirely wiped out with prejudice immediately. And even after being in the empire for hundreds of years, it was understood they were only marginally accepted and not remotely respected. It was only through writers who utterly forgot the basics of the setting years later that ended up writing themselves into a corner and declaring that the Shinjo would be demoted in exchange for raising the Moto up to be the Unicorn main clan... I am guessing they seemed like the most "Unicorn" Unicorns at that point and made it easier to subsequently turn the Unicorns into villains.
 
So other than these entanglements that happen twice in a thousand years at a clan level, the rule stands hard-- the people the story focuses on in Rokugan are not the common people, not the average citizen, not the person one is likely to run across if one runs across a random individual from Rokugan. Rather they are the elite of the elite who don't extend respect or basic human dignity to the overwhelming majority of humanity, the idea that they would be extending it so easily to a monster that is even less than human in so many of the aspects so important to the people does not stand up to scrutiny.
 
It really comes across as one of those mistakes that was made because the people writing the thing forgot that the characters they were writing about were an insulated, isolated, xenophobic group of aristocrats lording over 90% of the denizens of the land and instead forgot entirely that the "invisible people" even existed, treating them as some sort of minority that hardly needs acknowledgement, and instead treating the clans as though they were the common, average citizen of their respective lands and utterly disregarding the very aspects that make their caste what it is.

Well, I propose that because that is how I feel they will mishandled when L5R was left in the hands of the people it was left in the hands of. How I feel the handling of nonhumans generally went from the time they were introduced.
 
It isn't so  much that I don't understand why things went horribly, horribly wrong-- but rather that I recognize that things did go horribly horribly wrong and feel like that is something that shouldn't be implemented if there is a real chance at a "do over".
 
The fundamental problem is that the writers who handled nonhumans fundamentally forgot the actual situation of the game when they were writing about them. They forgot that any samurai were discriminatory elitists who reacted violently towards anything that didn't meet their impossible standards and instead acted as if the clans were the average people of the province and if one was acting in the province, it was inevitable that one was interacting with that particular clan and that members of that clan would react to them as an average, tolerant, open-minded individual would react to them.
 
As such, within the context of keeping the "invisible" people invisible, some of the interaction between the samurai class of Rokugan and the nonhumans could possibly make a bit of sense.
 
Once you zoom out though, once you take a look at the larger picture where one begins to understand that the samurai class as a whole is this group of intolerant psychopaths who slaughter anyone who even slightly deviates from their way of life without a thought and is completely intolerant, if not outright oppressive, to the majority of humanity and that humanity being kept "in their place" by the samurai culture are those the non-humans would first and foremost be interacting with.... literally none of the garbage written about non-humans in Rokugan makes the least bit of sense and is clearly an aspect of the setting that wa not remotely thought out and approached with the kind of fanfic Mary Sueness that would just not pass if anyone handling L5R dealt with an editor or at least a second opinion to point out how inconsistent one's ideas were.
 
This doesn't mean I am saying that Ratlings couldn't or shouldn't exist. Rather what I am saying is that treating the non-human creatures of the setting as proper PC options should come alongside treating  the common humans outside the elite samurai class in the game as viable player options. And if done correctly, might well cast the samurai who are the main focus of the game in such a negative or contentious light that one might find oneself struggling against the very character that might be their own PC under a samurai-focused game.
 
And certainly that could be an extraordinarily interesting game that might well help those involved to improve as individuals.
 
The problem though is if you talk about introducing non-humans into the core game without first addressing the fact that the PCs in the normal version of L5R are the elite aristocrats who are part of a discriminatory system that would be fundamentally incapable of remotely accepting anything as different as a Naga or a Ratling and if they could be swayed and changed, quite a lot about the fundamental way they live and conduct their business would also be capable of being swayed and changed... and instead, falling into the trap the writers previously fell into and instead forgetting that the 90% "invisible" people even remotely exist and treating the discriminatory elite as though they were the normal individuals who could afford to be open-minded to those who were different from themselves.
 
Well before you can posit the clans of Rokguan being open to treating a Ratling or Naga or Mermaid as part of their clan, you first need to change the fundamentals of the setting so that someone who was born to a family of farmers or merchants or who was born beyond the borders of Rokugan and looks a bit different from the native people can be accepted as a member of their clan. Because the schism where humans are slightly different are utterly unacceptable but something that is drastically not human and further from the ideal person than those among humanity who fail the standards of inclusion into the society.. that is just too drastic of a 'wtf' aspect to really accept.
 
Honestly, I kind of wish those who introduced such non-humans to L5R in the manner that they were introduced could explain what the hell they were thinking when they handled things they were. But I have a feeling that they were so over-sensitive and abusive of what power they did have that they would not only ignore any request for any sort of justification for their nonsensical writing, but would act as though even raising such a question was an abuse of the privilege of even being allowed to ask a question and should be punished severely.
 
So since the handling of nonhuman in L5R was royally screwed up and undermined a major part of its concept, it is quite reasonable to propose that anyone who insists that nonhumans be included in L5R as they were or even having their roles vastly expanded is proposing their inclusion in such a contradictory, thoughtless, hapless and deeply destructive manner as they previously were.... or far worse.
 
 
And that doesn't mean that you can't make a version of L5R that can be more open accepting of nonhuman species. But understand first and foremost that before one is open to non-human species, one has really got to be open to a wider slice of humanity than the samurai class of L5R is depicted as being, and the previous writers who handled the setting utterly failed at this in a spectacular fashion. You can have a setting where Kitsune can join clans-- but it doesn't make sense for that to exist in a world where a person born as a farmer or a person born beyond the borders of Rokugan cannot join a clan.

There are other settings than 40k that can get you that. I mean even if you brighten up the game slightly you will need to change a lot about the setting. Everything about Hive Worlds or Factory Worlds, the living conditions of the people, rampant slavery, life expectancy in the 30s. The treatment of voidsmen on ships, hauling on chains to drag cannons into place and so on.
 
The grim darkness is prevalent throughout the game itself.

Attack Run (Canonical from Ciaphas Cain)
 
Attack Run was a serial holodrama produced in the Imperium during the 920's.M41, focusing on a fictional squadron of Lightning fighter pilots during the Gothic War
 
Inquisitor Who
 
The last member of the Ordo Chronus travels throughout time and space within the Imperium to prevent heresies and worlds from falling into the grip of Chaos, all in his custom Aquila that is bigger on the inside.
 
One-Prayer Saint
 
An ordinary human devotes himself to extreme prayer training to the Emperor, and after 300 days achieves a level of faith that allows him to banish daemons and witches with just one prayer.
 
The I Files
 
Two Adeptus Terra Adepts are reassigned to the lost files where they uncover bizarre cases that the Inquisition has missed in order to save their Hive city from a conspiracy involving invading Eldar.

But what is the quintessential rogue trader?
 
Are all the same?
 
Have all the same interests?

This post is entirely my opinion. I hope this is obvious. I consider myself an L5R purist, which doesn't really mean anything, especially because my "perfect" L5R could be different from yours. And I'll probably get some things wrong, too.
Part 1: Nostalgia
I was born in 1986, and L5R was my prominent hobby during my formative years. I played L5R from the beginning, and in nearly every form. The CCG, RPG, Clan War, Disk Wars, a dice game I can't remember the name of. I remember the Day of Thunder as it happened. I will never forget opening the Crane starter deck that had Togashi Yokuni, and knowing I would always play Dragon Clan, and then being completely amazed when I found out he was an ACTUAL DRAGON, and the heartbreak of his sacrifice. And of course the smell of opening the packs. As a youth, I dreamed of living in Rokugan and wondering if I would be a Mirumoto or a Togashi. And with the RPG, I didn't have to dream.
Part 2: What L5R is to me (and why I stopped)
L5R is a game about samurai conflict in a warring state. The key word there is samurai. Looking back at the origin of the game, the characters felt human. My interest began to fade right around the time riding sea dragons became a thing. Magic always was a part of Rokugan, but it became so high magic that the characters felt less human and the game felt less authentic (and I use that term loosely) to the samurai genre.
The right amount of magic in Rokugan is this: you barely notice when it is there, and you barely notice when it is not there. Of course, powerful displays of magic have always been embedded within the rich history of Rokugan, as they should continue to be. But I'd rather "mystical" be the appropriate term, rather than "magical". Present, but subtle.
Part 3: Redesigning (Thematically)
It's time to write a new story. The origin of Rokugan, the great Kami and their Clans, is a great starting point. Keep that. Everything else can go. Find a way to tell a new story with completely new characters, but make the story about samurai drama. There are so many tales that could be told. Every battle has a unique story, every Winter Court, but the most memorable stories are those that are grounded in the human element. Draw from Japanase folklore and mythology. Make it personable, and show the struggle of balancing honor and duty, duty and self.
"Everything else can go" is scary, but nobody is taking any memories or accomplishments away. A timeline where the Battle of Beiden Pass doesn't exist is weird to me, but quite frankly, it is also the only reason I am here and posting this: a completely fresh look at L5R and Rokugan. For me, wiping the slate clean is the most appealing for the future. The past will always be there as players of a game, but it doesn't have to be as characters within Rokugan.
Simplify. Each Great Clan was originally based on a tenent of Bushido. Scale back to the original seven. I'm sure there is still room in the design to somehow include Minor Clans, mytical creatures, and ronin. But focus on making the Great Clans great. Focus on their conflicts.
Part 4: Redesigning (Mechanically)
Make L5R YOUR own game. Don't make it a re-hash of AEG's game. Start with an idea, or a set of ideals (samurai, honor, politiics, war, duels, etc) and make a game to fit them. Pretend you've never played the CCG or the RPG. Test your mechanics. And test them again and again, try to break them. Make the game simple enough to balance, but complex enough that SKILL is the prominent deciding factor for who wins. Never make a play style that doesn't let the other player or players play.

It could be enough if the Rokugan's samurais act more as real samurais during the sengoku jidai: they were all bastards AND more adventurous!
I'd like less stereotyped clans, and gaijin: the colonies are empty! There are few survivors, it would be more interesting a cultures clash to me.
I'm for a total reboot.
 
Instead, the card game needs only good rules.
 
Sorry form my bad english.

It could be enough if the Rokugan's samurais act more as real samurais during the sengoku jidai: they were all bastards AND more adventurous!
I'd like less stereotyped clans, and gaijin: the colonies are empty! There are few survivors, it would be more interesting a cultures clash to me.
I'm for a total reboot.
 
Instead, the card game needs only good rules.
 
Sorry form my bad english.

It could be enough if the Rokugan's samurais act more as real samurais during the sengoku jidai: they were all bastards AND more adventurous!
I'd like less stereotyped clans, and gaijin: the colonies are empty! There are few survivors, it would be more interesting a cultures clash to me.
I'm for a total reboot.
 
Instead, the card game needs only good rules.
 
Sorry form my bad english.

It could be enough if the Rokugan's samurais act more as real samurais during the sengoku jidai: they were all bastards AND more adventurous!
I'd like less stereotyped clans, and gaijin: the colonies are empty! There are few survivors, it would be more interesting a cultures clash to me.
I'm for a total reboot.
 
Instead, the card game needs only good rules.
 
Sorry form my bad english.

Also note that the "bushido virtues" of Rokugan do not actually correspond to "real" Bushido directly. 'Cause, you know, they were hastily ported over for a game played by people with a primarily movie/anime/manga understanding of bushido.

I just hope they don't go with the dice mechanic they used for Warhammer and are using for StarWars.

Because if this game was in a good state design wise, it wouldn't be sold. 

They could bought it for the setting, or they could buy it to finish off their potential rival (who also was sole king of the "samurai games") in order to not having to divide the pie of "people wanting to play samurai games" with AEG . If you can make a new setting and compete with already estabilished setting, OR kill that other setting and make your own, second decision is probably better; I mean, even during 2 years hiatus, people will probably go to your games because what else they have to do if they want to play card games? Go chase magic? 
Gameplay comes first. Setting is secondary. If it was another way around, AEG wouldn't have to sell the game that was dying.

Noooope. I'm here to play the game. The extent to which I care about the story is that which is represented by the mechanics. The most important thing about the game is the actual gameplay. If I to focus on setting and lore, I'll read a book or play an RPG.
 
I'm not saying I'm in the majority, but let's not use sweeping terms like "we all know XX." Different players favor different aspects of the game.
 
I kid you not when I tell you I played the reboot of Doomtown for about a year, read one piece of fiction and barely glanced at flavor text (I couldn't quote a single one). That's just not why I play card games these days.

While I agree that some of 20 Years Of L5R has bad fanfiction quality, I find idea of purging this fanfiction in order to return to start of the story kind of funny. Because at this point, you are literally writing fanfiction to original Day of Thunder, and forcing your writers to write characters of other people instead of their own, and to constantly live in the shadow of original Day of Thunder. 
Fresh start and FFGs Very Own Story is desperately needed, but you don't need to antagonize and disrespect your predecessors to do that. Just acknowledge that ancient history is ancient history, make a wink and a nudge to it from time to time, and proceed with your own story and your own characters. Let Kachiko, Kisada and rest of the gang rest, and don't reanimate them into fanfiction zombies; and give your writers chance to write THEIR OWN characters and THEIR OWN stories.

One option might be to have Kanpeki just fail off-screen, but not before toppling the Iweko dynasty, then start the game off with the recently victorious Great Clans trying to determine who should take the throne now. No need to go into all the details about previous dynasties or who Seiken and Shibatsu are, and it starts to game off with a focus on inter-Clan conflict (which to me at least should be the focus of the game) instead of another Big Scary Monster Thing, all without an actual reboot.

Outside the Clan Wars and Gold Edition every storyline of L5R has felt like a giant mess to me.  I had no investment in the current plot, but I can understand the sentiment of wanting to start back where it left off.  I will say though that retcons aren't necessarily a bad thing.  There have certainly been some events in Rokugan's history that would be best forgotten or changed.
 
As for a reboot, it really just depends on how they went about it.  If they wanted to recapture the magic of the Clan Wars then I think that'd be a mistake, as much as I love that time period.  I'll echo what others have said about the Colonies.  To me it detracts from the game more than adds to it, the game should be centered on Rokugan.