Over the years the dynamic may have changed, but my own experience has been that Tremblefist forces heroes who are really dependent on great cabal powers to actually suffer the consequences of losing and having to retrieve their item, instead of waiting for lowbies to do it and tell them on AIM to log back in/log in at all.

The last time I experienced this was over a decade ago, but I still have a grudge from the almost 2 year series of rager bandwagons.
What is the situation like now?

It was extremely frustrating because, barring a few players with some balls who'd show up to retrieve when it's hard (thinking of Marcus, Twist, Borkhad), you'd literally never get to actually fight RBWs without the head, even if you just finished killing them to take it. And #### the noise about that being easy to arrange.

Really biased against it. Low to mid level ragers are still really strong in PK at the ranges they'd struggle with Tremblefist. I don't give a #### about them. You're a regular warrior with free detect invis, but minus a return potion for a while, deal. Heroes should just go retrieve their item, period.

Option 3 sounds really cool though.

edit: I will say I'm not completely unsympathetic, because from what I gather, it sounds like there is a problem with Empire bandwagons, which is exactly the kind of behavior that made me like how Tremblefist works in the first place.