Interesting -- I just learned those non-mean rules a couple of weeks ago at Worldcon. (The lady from Kadon Enterprises was mentioning them to me.) I wonder where they originally came from?

Regardless, I may adopt them as the norm for smaller games, regardless of age. When you've got a big crowd for Goose (~10 players), people are tripping over each other enough that it isn't a problem, but when you're playing with a small table of 4-5 people folks can get stuck in the well for basically the whole game, and that's never fun. And since I'm gathering that house rules were fairly normal for Goose, I don't feel that it's an unreasonable hack...