I am also generally of the mind that if I wanted it to be simpler, I wouldn't play A5e in the first place. I specifically picked it because I donn't like how simple o5e is. However, I do think it's possible to speed it up. VTTs definitely help a LOT. We've been using Foundry for years now and the one time we played in person, every round took 2-3x longer. Not because it's any harder to know what your character can do (though having every feature, maneuver, etc fully detailed in one convenient place on the VTT is handy), but because rolling real dice and adding them up and then doing math to figure out how much HP you have left after that and so on really adds up. That's all instant on a VTT and it saves way more time than you might realize.
Static expertise is also a good solution, though I think that only really matters playing in person. Since math is instant in a VTT, it really makes no difference. But that's essentially what Pathfinder 2 does. Each level of "expertise" in a skill gives you an additional +2 (IIRC), which is roughly equivalent to taking average on an expertise die (if you also take into account that the numbers go much higher in PF2e generally).
