Hmm. I can approve of stylized communication constraints (for example, I like the bidding mechanism in Bridge). That was where I was trying to go with the idea that only the player whose turn it is can talk. Another possible idea for Pandemic would be that you can only show your hand to someone in the same city: you'd probably need to drop the constraint that you can only trade the card of the city you are on, then. (and then the researcher's ability could change to be that that player would play with their hand open)

And yeah, mentally I think of Settlers as being a longer game than it really is, I should fix that.