Ways to improve Sword Art Online

This is mainly for my followers who are anime fans and have some opinion-positive or negative- of the show. Look below the break for the rest of the post.

So, two days ago, I was talking with one of my friends at school, and I discovered he watched SAO. Like me, he liked it, but we were aware of the flaws. So, I thought I'd put out some of the stuff we talked about, and what I came up with since then.
1:Kirito is OP in the begining. There's really no way to fix this without altering the early season one, and even then, we have to remember a few things. One: that was against lower level players, and every single gamer knows that certain players will make themselves nearly impossible to kill just for fun. Two: he was high level already, which, for those of you who don't fully grasp the leveling system of games, means more XP is needed for level ups, meaning more monster kills, and we've seen monsters don't respawn, making a finite supply of XP for everyone, Kirito included
2: The forced plot harem. Either make the female characters have personality without overshadowing Asuna, or ditch it entirely. I'd say this is the simplest fix of season one.
3: Kirito's personality. As writers, we all know it can be easy to fall into pitfalls with characters like making them "edgy", but Kirito-past episode three- is bland. We should have seen more stress on him given the death of the players he was with in episode three(see SAO abridged for a prime example of this). The simple solution is add more to his personality than, as the youtuber Mother's Basement put it, "sullen and miserable" like we see in the intro and is until he and Asuna get together. Which brings us to
4: Yui. Again, I'm referring to Mother's Basement here, and more accurately, the video he did about how he believes SAO became the worst anime. The scene in question is the one fighting the digital manifestation of Death in the secret dungeon. Admittedly, he did make a fair point of all dramatic tension being thrown out the window with that scene, and the simple fix is this: take away her access to the system: make her sacrifice herself to destroy the secret boss. No way to save her, have her die with the thing while leaving a message for Asuna and Kirito explaining what she was.
5: The "die in game, die in real life" aspect. We noticed a problem tension wise with this, and that would be the fact there's no build up to it. His solution was simple, have a special event notice pop up, such as "Upon reaching level three, you will receive a special message." This has both the player and the viewer in suspense, and up to that point, the game plays like normal, and as people reach floor three, the concept of the show comes into play. My solution was more of a twist near the end of season one. What is it? Have it be a lie. What do I mean? Well, have players that die from monsters wake up in the real world while those that commit suicide actually die, as I'm sure a game like SAO would have a system to read how someone died. The people awake couldn't communicate with those trapped, so they couldn't go after a monster and let themselves be killed (something we've all done to farm XP or something else in a game, I'm sure). In short, it'd be a digital "natural selection". Those who die fighting get to live, while those who kill themselves(or are killed by other players in a duel as long as the one killed is awake) die. We wouldn't know about it until the end of season one, and would fix the plot hole of Kirito and Asuna being alive.
If you guys like this post, I'll do another for each SAO arc up to where it is now. So, if you guys liked this or have your own ideas, comment below, this is something I'd like to hear your guys' thoughts on.