Personally I would love to do a permadeath series where you bring back Kerbals as descendants or clones. So you could have Bob the 3rd or Bill the 16th or Jeb the 4,013th. Instead of having a name change you could probably have a new field in the character stats called GenNo for Generation Number. You could see how many times you killed the Fantastic Four. Maybe have a memorial wall for all the Kerbals that died too.
Yes it is fun to blow up Kerbals but it is even greater fun to save their lives... and having a memorial to all those who you failed to save would make those saved Kerbals lost in the black even more profound.