Frankly, the escalation system is way too rapid as it currently stands IMO and simply being told to ignore players that engage in it is not... REALLY a solution?
Yes, the level of progression is quite troublesome but GangRP/CrimeRP is fast-paced and can be high risk, high reward. In my statement, I said things could be changed, but if this was denied then it wouldn't matter. What I was suggesting wasn't a removal of the '9.3c' rule, it was just adding onto said rule as I truly believe if you are knocked out you should have a chance to attack said people(if you know who they are), and retaliate properly.
what happens if you only find out once you start actually fighting as a result of actual IC conflict that they're terrible at fighting RP and solely follow the "rules" aforementioned?
If people do not PainRP properly or do not even Roleplay properly, you are more than able to report the said person for not following the rules properly. Now, you can avoid people in character if it's a character you have problems with, you would have enough reason to ignore them or avoid them. Now if they attempt to bait, you can also report said player for baiting perms as that is not allowed by the SRP Rules.
So for the '5.5' rule, if you have an IN CHARACTER reason not to interact with them, then you can completely ignore them and just walk away or just not interact with them. Try to always have an in-character reason to avoid someone's character in an IC aspect of things.
Its not really a 'rule' problem, yes there are some rules that are more on the grey side of things and should be 're-written' as to better explain it to the community, or simply go to a member of staff about a question over a set of rules if you are un-sure on what it means in the entirely.
In short, if you don't want your character to get hurt in any form then you just need to completely avoid that side of SRP and the Crime/GangRP side of the server, that rule has been in place for years as Cam said and will not be removed and the Crime/GangRP'ers will fight to keep that rule. It is not hard to stay out of that side of the community, its a type of high risk/high reward part of the community and you have to understand that there are a lot of players that are 'perm hungry' and will use perms because they have them(which is boring imo)