I just made a general fishing rarity rework post, but I have an alternate concept for a way to make fishing more enjoyable: Fish Trade-Ups.
The idea is similar to the mechanic in TF2: In short, you take a bunch of items, in this case, fishing items, and can trade them up for a random item of a higher rarity.
I think for TU, rather than being based solely on the rarity, you would take an item and convert it into points based on the amount of units it’s worth- you then can spend those points on, a random reward of a given group- this way you could convert unwanted Rare fish to just trying to reroll to get a particular other Rare fish you want, rather than strictly trading “up”.
It’d also be nice to have some specific items to trade up to- as I said in my other thread, sea dollars are way too rare, so being able to specifically dump Garbage Fish into getting sea dollars would be great. Other specific items would be like Catsacks, Silver Catsacks, other event coins during events, maybe other non-fishing item pools like washed to sea items, soul items during halloween, and so on. Maybe even the ability to trade in these points for units.
Overall, the goal of this is just to get Fishing to be an overall worthwhile activity. As far as things to do in the lobby go, fishing, even during the fishing event, is the lowest. I absolutely never see anyone fishing and the only reason I do it is to try and squeak my milestones up during the double EXP event.