Sounds interesting, but how about instead of "re-spawn at closest city", you get to pick the area you want to re-spawn because of increased time of not being able to be in the action? No, not exact location, but an area like "really far south", "kinda in the middle of it all", "somewhere on the west shoreline" etc. These options would come in dialog for after you completed your work. Of course, if anything related to skejwen's suggestion is implemented, re-spawn points should be more dynamic, as in more available choices to re-spawn at.
As for the suggestion itself, don't devs already have a modified re-spawn system they will implement after update?