I’m really heartened that we are having this conversation here. While there are clearly plenty of things that need to be improved, the fact that we are having this dialog is a step in the right direction. There were many great points and good suggestions in this thread 
I wanted to chime in on just a few of them for now as I have some concrete thoughts on what we can immediately do about improving signaling and decreasing erroneous duplicates, like the 3 gas increase proposals that are currently in flight.
On the topic of deposits, the deposit amount is easily governable. We just need to create a proposal that calls the setMinDeposit() function on the Governance contract. I agree with @Thylacine that increasing it to 1000 CELO could make senes, but I would keep the current refund mechanics and see what effect just the increase would have. I suspect an increased deposit would result in people double checking everything in their proposal before submitting, which might help with erroneous and duplicate proposals.
Secondly, the current governance process includes having proposals go through an upvote stage. Right now, upvoting feels somewhat superfluous because all proposals reach the referendum stage so long as someone upvotes them with any amount (assuming there aren’t too many proposals in flight which hasn’t been the case). I suggest modifying this slightly and requiring a threshold of upvotes (e.g. 100K CELO) within a time period for the proposal to make it to the referendum stage. This would bring us closer to other governance protocols where proposers are required to have a significant stake, but would allow that stake to come from others backing the proposal via upvotes.
Currently, if a proposal does not make it to the referendum stage, the deposit is not returned, so this will also mean that deposits will only be returned for proposals that have a certain amount of support. We could set this threshold to 100K CELO to start, so proposals can proceed to the referendum stage if they can get 5 validators on board.
Making this change would require upgrading the Governance contract code, but the change would be quite minimal. This is also not to say I’m not curious to research and learn more about alternatives like Allo (Welcome @0xZakk 
), I’m just thinking about what are some very small and concrete changes we can make asap. Curious what people think.