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Hello,
I'm enamored with the necromancer and I've done a few playtests (they're archived in this forum somewhere) but it's true that the thrall mechanism, while engaging, can feel limitating at times.
Some people would love to see the horde fantasy a la diablo, with lots of skeletons and ghouls and ghosts, but we won't have that, because it would clog the battlefield too much and PF2e has always been against that. The best you could do would be a lvl 16 Beastmaster Summoner who's summoning a monster and thus has 4 henchmen on the table.
Some people would love to see bigger and better monsters, like a Skeleton King or a Lich - but that's stepping on the toes of regular summoning.
What I'd love to see, as it would be fun and novel, would be some ways to use thralls as an anchor for your spells. It would also give a few interesting strategic choices like "do I set up a nova round later with the risk that my thralls will get destroyed, or do I use my power now, even if it's less effective ?"
Something like:
BONE SPEAR
A bone spear is created from two of your thralls no farther than 30 feet from each other. Everybody in the line between the two thralls get hit for XXX piercing damage.
DARK TRIANGLE
Every creature in a triangle between three thralls get hit for XXX spirit damage
FORCE SQUARE
A cage of force springs to life, powered by the life of four thralls. The walls are anchored to the thralls, and destroying a thrall destroys the section of the wall.
PENTACLE OF EVIL DOOM
Your five thralls aren't consumed. As long as they're all alive, every enemy in the pentacle is slowed 1/enfeebled/feared/whatever.
Of course, when you're level 1, you can hardly do a bone spear. But when you're level 7, a triangle is usable and so on and so forth.
The idea to anchor some spells to your thralls makes sense in a flavor point of view, it's a different mechanism than what has been done so far, and it turns the necromancer into an - evil, giggling - chess player ^^
I do like the idea of chaining stuff between yourself and your thralls (my initial incorrect reading of bone spear was that the line was from the thrall to yourself and i liked that idea). it would make positioning the thralls an even more fun tactical minigame
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The math might balance better & options would open up earlier if the Necromancer could also serve as one of the focal points. Then early levels could participate (and Bone Spear is an early level spell right now) and the Pentacle could see actual play.
They could also be encapsulated in one feat that compounds with more Thralls, perhaps numerically, off a chart, off a list, or by worsening the saves of enemies.