As a spectator, that is the biggest blight on the game. The amount of stoppages is killing it. They need to get rid of injury stoppages, unless it’s scrum time or a broken leg, water breaks, repeated scrum resets… the game should be faster. Third umpire rulings should be viewed in real time and only alert the referee of the infringement if it is necessary like football does. Rave,rave rave!
I agree and it is worse at the elite level than anywhere else.
The problem is that it's largely a player issue that needs to be fixed. I don't see how else you can fix it. A referee can't judge if someone is injured. You can't make a decision that a player isn't injured enough to require play not to be restarted. Players are the only ones that can stop going down for some sort of injury to delay the restart of play.
I agree that World Rugby really need to speed up the TMO process. Clear guidelines around the onfield decision trumping the TMO unless there is clear evidence to overturn it. Clear evidence should be clear. If you can't see it in a couple of replays then you go with the onfield decision. You don't end up with a better situation after watching 15 replays of the same thing.
In terms of foul play I definitely advocate for something that is at least a yellow card being done straight away. The TMO then has 10 minutes to go through a thousand replays to work out whether it should be yellow or red. At some stoppage in play the yellow can be confirmed or upgraded to red and you've avoided looking at replays for 3 minutes of where exactly the contact originated etc.
I also think we should just stop the clock for shots at goal after x number of seconds and for any scrum resets. I feel like the actual stoppages are less of an issue than the knowledge of how much game time you are losing with nothing happening.