My thoughts on the subject:
I've been playing a lot of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup lately because of how fun and straightforward it is to play, yet in spite of all the time it saves you wandering around the dungeon exploring safely and preventing you from doing stupid suicidal things like walking into zot traps and lava, you can still get into incredibly tough situations and really need to think about how you can best get out of this situation - and as a result, you have to think about what you take with you and what skills you train first. Streamlining the trivial and the mundane of DC:SS means getting to these kinds of situations more often as a proportion of time spent playing, and I like that.
In addition, DC:SS lets you customize its default behaviour, to do things like:
-Arbitrarily many messages/regexes can be configured to force a --More-- (meaning you have to press enter before any further actions will be considered by the game). For instance, I've forced it to wait when I try to cast a spell and no monsters are in range, preventing the 'attempt to cast and walk to where I wanted to cast' degenerate behaviour. Since every spell has a different circular range, you'll inevitably get it wrong.
-Arbitrarily many messages/regexes can be configured to not interrupt running/resting.
-You can make it so some items are automatically inscribed to not be used without a prompt, e.g. so you don't use a scroll of blinking by mistake.
-You can set a 'low hp warning' or 'low mana warning' to appear at whatever % of maximum you like, and whenever either drops below that to force --More--.
Such 'safety mechanisms' are ESPECIALLY important when you play Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup online (as I always do), since latency means it would take forever if you had to stop and rescan the screen after -every- move. Of course, you should build a good mental picture of what's going to happen next, but it's also good to know that you won't accidentally kill yourself by playing a few moves ahead. (By the way, is there a DoomRL online server?)
A DC:SS inspired safety features package for DoomRL would look something like the following:
-Messages in the command prompt whenever one or more monsters come into LOS for the first time, indicating what their names are as well.
-A key like o for autoexplore. In crawl, autoexplore repeatedly moves to the nearest accessible unexplored tile, stopping every time something 'interesting' comes into view (like a staircase, or an item category on your 'stops autoexplore' list). In addition, if a monster is in view, it stops and won't do anything if you press it again. (It also says due to what monster(s) it won't continue moving for.)
-Shift+dir for running. In crawl, running makes you move repeatedly in that direction until you come into an intersection or are standing on top of something interesting. Like autoexplore, it will stop and not do anything if a monster is in view, making this another way to move around safely. In other games like angband, running can be configured to automatically go around bends in corridors and skip corners.
-A key like X, which makes a detached cursor you can move over the map through walls. If you hit enter with it over any known tile, it will make your character beeline towards that tile, going around hazards and stopping if any monsters come into view. In addition, if you hit the character of a glyph while in X mode, it selects the nearest instance of that glyph (e.g. > for stairs) and, if there's more than one instance of it, hitting it more times will cycle through all instances from clostest to furthest away.
-The ability to match regexes on any line of output (and certain other conditions, e.g. taking X amount of damage / going below X hp / invincibility or berzerk wearing off...) and force the player to acknowledge the new condition by hitting 'enter' before new input will be recognized.
-When doing any long action that makes you vulnerable, halt the player if any monster comes into view, and ask for y/n confirmation if a monster is in view at the start of it.
-Force a --More-- prompt if you're hammering r and a monster comes into view.
-Ask the player for y/n confirmation if you are currently not in acid/lava and attempt to walk into acid/lava (and you will take some damage from it).
-And possibly some more things I haven't thought of! But if you don't think a game like this could ever work/be difficult, try DC:SS at
http://tiles.crawl.develz.org ;)