A fan could have reasonably dreamed back in '98 or something, but I think it's a bit too late to hope for anything.
Dreaming is easy. In my dream world, Conan O'Brien got to keep The Tonight Show after killing both Jay Leno and Jimmy Fallon in single combat, but walked away to return to The Simpsons. He has since put out the best season in a decade, and will be leaving to run his Mr. Burns spinoff just as soon as Brad Bird's schedule clears and he can take over as head writer on Simpsons. And the finale was amazing -- who'd have thought they'd write a whole episode around Phil Hartman butting heads with Albert Brooks? And it's great that Hartman can still put in an episode or two every year, even with his commitments on Futurama and Pee-Wee's Playhouse.
...as for things to hope for in real life? I hope they continue to use celebrities competently instead of just as "Hey look, a celebrity!" derailments.
Some good examples of recent celebrity cameos: Werner Herzog was wonderful as the drug rep who is also apparently a grown-up Augustus Gloop. Joey Kramer's apperance among Edna's cavalcade of exes was good; yes, it was a "Hey look, a celebrity!" gag, but it played well even as a random reference (which of course longtime fans know it wasn't).
Kristen Schaal's appearance the other week -- well, in theory it's what a celebrity guest appearance should be, in that it's not all about the celebrity but that she's just playing a character who's part of the story. In practice, however, she was totally underutilized; she's possibly the funniest person on TV and CERTAINLY the funniest person in Fox's animation lineup, and here she did a totally bland read of a role that could have been played by absolutely anyone.
But it was still better than "HEY LOOK BRITNEY SPEARS!"
Okay, so competent celebrity guest appearances. I'd also argue for fewer pop culture references in general (though they mercifully spent much less time on Jersey Shore than I would have expected). And there needs to be a happy medium between doing shit they've already done before ("wedding after wedding after wedding") and trying too hard to come up with new and outlandish plots (truffle hunting?). As the AV Club recently pointed out, people may gripe about Simpsons reusing plots, but back in the show's golden period you had Lisa's Pony one week and Saturdays of Thunder the next and they have pretty much the exact same plot except one features Lisa and the other features Bart, and they're still both classics. It's simple -- think about what defines the characters and work from there; if it's good it'll work even if we've seen it a hundred times before.
And taking the show back to a three-act structure would be a good idea too. The current four-act structure really just leaves too many plots with not enough time for any of them to be satisfying.
it's the weakest of Fox's Sunday lineup.
Pretending The Cleveland Show doesn't exist won't make it go away.
