Other than automating renewal - which we have made huge strides on - what adaption would you want to see?
I'd like to see better support for networks that aren't connected to the broader internet, or moving away from X.509. Note that these are contradictory. X.509 was intentionally designed to support offline verification and has a lot of elaborate ceremony to support it (like all the rest of the OSI stack). The industry just doesn't, so we get the worst of both worlds.
The number one thing for me would be to standardize methods to implement soft failures. Minimally in standard clients and libraries the ability to warn when certs are nearing expiration. Cert extensions to declare lifecycle expectations and possibly even warning endpoints for notification. Basically some way to empirically look at a valid cert and know something is wrong before it fails.
There are all sorts of potential privacy/security issues with any feature built in this area so it would have to be done carefully, but I think useful improvements could easily be made.