Both of these would solve that, yes. But I personally wouldn't mind too much if the host was treated more harshly than the client, as @guerringuerrinsaid they have more responsibility already and the main thing is that either side can't ruin the game.

Weird, works on my end. You have another mod enabled? Are you testing on the released version of the game or on the development version?

Hard crash

Out of curiosity, is making a .DAE plugin for Blender that runs on the latest versions on the table for you guys?  It's a problem that is very easy to workaround at the moment as you only really need to go to an older version of Blender to get .DAE support again, but it would be nice to not have to juggle between different Blender versions whenever I want to work on art assets/mods for 0 AD :p