I'll go through all your points and address them to clear anything up and make it easy on drive teams.
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Similar to "traditional" pedestal issues, the head referee isn't always quick at relighting the pedestal. (However the head referee at Howell was very good at this.) This generally causes match delays, however it's not that significant.
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It is the drive team's responsibility to make sure the head referee knows they want to call a dead ball. Holding up the sign by itself won't work. You need to pound on the glass and have someone run to the nearest referee to get their attention. This is what I instructed teams to do in during the drivers meeting, and it worked really well. Generally pounding on the glass was enough for me to notice. If you just hold up the sign, you can only blame yourself for it taking a while for the pedestal to light up.
Also keep in mind that it is your responsibility to call for a dead ball, not the head ref's. So don't get mad when a dead robot has a ball trapped and a dead ball isn't being called while you aren't holding up the sign.
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What happens when both alliances call a dead ball at the same time? The head referee is bound to notice one before the other, which will result in one pedestal being illuminated before the other. Again, a fairly minor issue, unless it's in the closing seconds of the match.
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In almost 130 matches at GKC, there were probably less than 10 dead ball signals. I highly doubt you'll ever run into a situation where both alliances want to call a dead ball. But like I said earlier, if it does happen, pound on the glass to get the head ref's attention while holding up the sign.
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What exactly is the human player supposed to do with the dead ball in the event the ball is passed to them?
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Give it to field reset. They will take it back to behind your driver station.
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How exactly are the referees supposed to keep track of which ball is dead and which ball is live, when it's hard enough to tell the difference between different coloured balls when there 4 robots and 2 balls all together bashing into each other (see 2:26 of this video.)
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I think you'll find that for Week 4 regionals on, there will be 2 refs dedicated to watching the balls for possessions and scoring. With that, it's fairly easy to keep track of which ball is dead and which is live. The head ref is also watching and helps point out which is dead and not to score it.
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Why? What strategic advantages do teams have for calling multiple dead balls? If I have 2 alliance partners who both die in autonomous, I literally cannot score anymore points, other than drawing fouls (everyone's favourite, right?). How would you feel if this specific event were to happen in on Einstein final match 3?
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You just said that it is difficult to keep track of 2 balls on the court already, why do you want to add more? I think this was done mainly to keep the arena clear and help out refs, but that's all I can think of.
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The major issue with dead balls is the GDC's apparent lack of foresight in seeing them! The dead ball update didn't come until 6 days after kickoff. Why was this not in the original set of rules? Teams picked up on this within hours of the manual being released.
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Would you rather have this information added after week 1 or 2 of regionals, like G26-1 and the changes to G40? It's easy to complain now, but just think how much bigger of an "issue" this would have been if it would have been added after competitions started.