what i was thinking we could do- as a sort of workaround for not being able to color debris- is spawn a bunch of bots on death (like, maybe 2) and give them the same appearance as the player, but hide some of the nodes and send them all flying in random directions
but instead of having each individual piece fall apart, each of these bots would have small groups of nodes visible, all 'attached' to one another: like, the 3 bots could (between them) have all the body parts, but one bot is just an arm and a leg (both the shoulder and hand, in addition to a foot), one bot is the hip and other leg, and the player is just the torso, head, and other arm
for particularly ridiculous kills (see: ion cannons, mininukes) that do extremely large amounts of damage, the player could just be fried by the damage; instead of just gibbing the player they're straight-up blown away (like this mod does) but instead of white, all the pieces are charred and mangled and really dark gray / black to the point that they're basically unidentifiable (which is probably the result of getting ioncannoned in the first place)