Shrouds should be retired.

I wouldn't be against giving shrouds another purpose. Like you said survivors will most likely spawn in the close proximity of each other.

But the real question is what could they do instead of tampering with survivor spawns?

I really like the idea of the lights, I think that's a subtle and interesting way to change up the game.

Not sure I understand what you're saying with the dust clouds (like I can't visualize it), but I would like a mechanic that punishes running a little more. I know you can be tracked with the scratches and all that, but I dunno...it feels like a huge part of gen rushing is that everyone just runs all the time. It could help pace games a little if there was something in addition to scratches. I main survivor and I don't really want to just run from one gen to the next the whole time.

Be better to simply hide all Offerings except ones that affect the other players, like BPS or Envelopes. It's a personal request to the Entity and should be treated with the respect and care it is due.

Shrouds are for the most part meme/noob things.

First of all, as you said, it makes no sense for Survivors to want to spawn together and for the Killer to want them to spawn apart.

This only made sense in the devs' heads back in development because before the game was released they believed it would be a "survival horror" game so they thought that Survivors will be scared and want to stay with their friends for safety and that the Killer will be like a movie slasher who wants to separate them and pick them off one by one.

Like you said, in reality it's the reverse - good Survivors prefer to spread out in order to pressure and contest multiple gens at once and any Killer's wet dream is to find all four Survivors huddled together at the start.

Obviously, the greatest advantage (among all the others) that Survivors have over Killer is that there's 4 of them and can be in multiple places at once while the Killer (yes, even a zero terror radius Nurse with 5 Blinks without cooldown and somehow a chainsaw on top of that) can only be in one place at a time.

In my opinion, rather than switching the shrouds, it should be made so that survivors working together are more powerful than when split up so that when a killer is efficient at splitting up survivors in chases and such, the killer is rewarded.

Yes, which is why my suggestion was to rework that game balance feature rather than retiring offerings. The times in the game at which it is beneficial for survivors to stick together are:

1. For getting flashlight and pallet stuns
2. Healing and unhooking
3. Pumping out the last generator
4. Taking hits for a survivor once the exit gates are opened

However, for some strange reason, the main objective, generators, do not follow this convention of survivor gameplay (and to some extent chases depending on the chase location). This is in part due to inefficieny debuffs and in part due to the killer's ability to guard a stationary object to prevent progress.

Killers benefit extremely from having survivors clumped up around one objective (unless it's a killer like scratched mirror myers on an open map). I think it's much healthier to promote gameplay that encourages survivors to be together and encourages killers to push them apart (on the whole, not in every scenario) due to the importance of interaction between players. I think it's poorly designed that the most efficient way of winning the game as a survivor is to avoid teammates until injured and split up to work on generators to abuse the fact that a killer can't realistically be in both places at the same time.

In the current state of the game, I've never once waved at a survivor to come over here an work on my gen unless I was dedicating myself to getting a certain generator done to avoid a three gen scenario. I find that strange.