To each their own but I think when the season stars and stops is a big deal. Also lessening the amount of preseason games is a big move as well.
What are these bigger fish that need frying in your eyes?
Need to do something about the pretty bad lack of parity and it being functionally way too hard to rebuild/retool with the restrictive systems in place (I.e. low and hard salary cap, uncompetitive free agency rules, the draft lottery being way too powerful combined with it being entirely luck based) compared to the other major leagues.
There are 9 teams with playoff droughts of 4+ seasons, that is *really* bad, regardless of how much blame you want to give to the franchises themselves (and either way, you have to admit it's WAY harder to rebuild in this sport) Baseball, a league with no cap at all and a complete crapshoot of a draft, only has 6 teams with 4+ year droughts. NFL and NBA only 4 teams each, with far less restrictive cap options and less powerful drafting systems...resulting in far fewer teams/fanbases in bleak, seemingly eternally painful situations
Only having those 16 spots occupied by merely 23 teams over 4 seasons is not a good thing, particularly when the league's models are based on gate revenues and you need to encourage people to pay to come to the games.
The NHL is the only league in the world the caters to the needs of its "small markets" (understanding that the context of what a small market is in hockey is different from what a small market may mean in different sports) ahead of its juggernauts.
I fully understand why this is the case, as the growth the game has seen down south is astonishing, however at some point you need to reassess things to make sure the system is working for everyone, because it really isn't right now.
I'm not just complaining for the sake of complaining, I have some ideas myself, but you didn't ask so I'm not going to get into all of that lol.