As the title says, And, if you had to start all over again would you?
 
I've been playing since 2 weeks after launch. I would not start over, can't imagine being a total noob in this game at the point it is in. Back then the biggest threats were Lazers and Rhinos and you didn't have to have a ton of businesses. I get ticked at my in game phone going off for the couple things I don't own, I would throw my controller at it if I had no businesses and it ran every 2 minutes.
 

It is on your top things R* needs to add to RDRO? 
 
Crew functions/lobbies - it's next to impossible to do anything in RDRO with your crew. And fix the player blips so you can see where your crew/friends are.
Ability to create our own playlists - just cuz, I like most of the game modes but it would be nice to select what I want to play specifically.
Poker - would be nice to take all your money with my sweet poker face
Hot AIr Balloons - I would like to just go where the wind takes me.
 
 

Which is better red dead or gta ?

I'm gonna pass on what I've learned about maintaining a successful crew. I created Domestic Battery over 5 years ago and it is still running strong while many other crews have broken up or has just died with time. This can probably be applied in many ways to crews/clans of any game but I'm gonna reference GTAO since RDRO doesn't have a crew system in place as of the time of posting this.
First off you need to define some base philosophy of what your crew is - is it a free aim crew such as The Damned Brotherhood led by @ajbns87, or a racing crew like Van Society led by @JuniorChubb (I think VANS does more racing than anything else) etc.. etc.. And I say this because when people are looking for a crew they are looking for something specific alot of times. My crew specializes in nothing but fun and that works for us but may not work for hard core deathmatch players who do not want to do anything but deathmatches.
So let's assumer you have a dozen or so members, a good start to a player base, right of the bat you might be thinking about promoting people to Lieutenant or Commissioner and the fact is if you do not need to promote someone don't. And don't promote people based on friendship. Promotions should be done based on tasks/jobs needing managed in the crew, such as a recruitment official, events person, etc.. basically putting someone in charge of specific duties of the crew. Giving these jobs to friends based on friendship alone all to often will prove to be  disaster because they have not earned the spot and they will not do the job because odds are you are not gonna want to demote your friend. If they were never promoted to begin with then they can't be mad about a demotion, just sayin.
So how do you promote then? Who is putting in that extra effort in your crew? That's who you need to promote. That said not everyone performs well once assigned a role, but you never now till you try.
 
Next thing is communication, you should be grooming your crew to be more than a crew, it should be a gaming community and this can only happen thru communication. Be it a crew website, an area here, Facebook, Discord, whatever.. you need to have a way to just shoot the sh*t. The tighter your members feel with each other the more likely they are to stick with you crew in the long haul.
 
Rules, no body wants to lay down a bunch of rules and I didn't either in the early days of Domestic Battery but it soon became a fact of life that we needed rules. If you are just a small group of people you probably won't need to many rules, but you should make it possible for your rules to develop over time with the size and demographic of your crew.
 
Events, no one wants to be in a do nothing crew. GTAO is an old game but it is possible to have entertaining events. Discover new ways to do the same ol thing. An event I will share that my crew does once in awhile is racing....nothing new about that but for this we host a playlist of GTA races and everyone gets out of their cars at the start and shoots out their tires and then races on the rims (NO TIRES RACING). That is a way of doing the same ol in a different way. Be inventive with events, be aware of how many people you can actually get to attend and tailor the event to that amount of people.
 
Run it like a business, overall try to take emotion out of your decisions just as if you were running a company. That may sound cold but when situations happen (and they will happen) you can't make the right decision if feeling become involved. Sure, you might p*ss off a friend but over all respect is earned by making logical decisions.
 
Know when to step down/back. If you start to feel burned out leading a crew you either need to step down or something. There is alot of good crews that went by the wayside because the leader abandoned the crew for whatever reason. In Domestic Battery I once got seriously burned out and I did step down. @Dodge was handed leadership because he was/is a very trusted member of the staff. When I was ready to return he let me have my lead spot back. We have an arrangement to pass leadership back and forth as needed.
 
Don't make being a 1000 member crew you goal, make being an active crew your goal. Adding members just for the sake of having a large crew means nothing. If you looked at those 1000 member crew real close you will see most only have 50 members who actually are active. And it makes it difficult for those 50 to identify who to play with. Domestic Battery is less then 100 members, 90% of those member I can talk about them personally like they are a family member, and 90% of them can be found in GTA or RDR at any given time of day.
Focus should be made on creating a gaming experience and fun.