Most of these changes sound like a writing system proposal (in terms of impact)-- a write system can be encoded and decode back without loss of anything-- lots of people have seen that it would be more useful to have a more concise way to write toki pona (and possible a more concise way to speak, but tp isn't a language of in person interaction, it's used by fans on the internet mostly). Personally I like speed writing/talking systems because the solve a problem.
I think I read in there at least one proposal to change grammar-- those are a different issue. When you change the grammar, anyone who is used to the old grammar will hear a different message. pi-chains disambiguate some things that aren't clear with just chains of words. If anything, tp is in need of more variations of "pi" to disambiguate more relationships. For example, most prep phrases could be pi phrases or "unmarked word chains", but there is no point because it would make the phrase even harder to understand.
I'm not particularly opposed to toki pona con dialects-- it's just recreational fun and if it attracts fan use, then super!, but I would quibble over which versions are backwards compatible, forwards compatible or completely compatible. A speaker that drops pi altogether will be unintelligible to a speaker that consintently uses pi. The lack of pi would also trigger the need for compensating strategies and you'd get a lot of very different texts.
Examples are worth a thousand words:
mi moku e kili kepeken ilo. I eat fruit with a fork. (I eat fruit with a machine)
mi moku e kili ilo. I eat forked fruit. (I eat machined fruit)
mi moku e kili kepeken ilo moku. I eat fruit with a eating machine (fork).
mi moku e kili pi ilo moku I eat fruit that somehow is related to a eating machine. Maybe it's the fork.
mi moku e kili ilo moku. I eat the mechanical, edible fruit. I eat fruit that is some how describable by the attributes of a machine and food, but in a way that I only hope that you can guess.
Now having defended pi, if I was going to create a small language, I wouldn't use pi. I would use something different. It's a difficult part of toki pona's grammar, I imagine there are other more creative, easier mechanism to do what pi does.