Late nights and days of stairs

Long day at the office as I attempted to make up some time lost with the dentist. I'm trying to bring this houses stairs up to US residential code, and its just too tight a space so I've been working on stretching and reconfiguring floor plans, and theres just no clear winner. All of them have bad compromises. Who wants to walk up a 8" riser stair, even if there are codes which permit it? Actually, whats killing me is the 36" width restriction. Either the stairs are too narrow, or the corridor is. On the other hand, people get way animated and fired up on the building code forums online. I followed a flame war over fireproofing the underside of stairs. (Spoiler: turns out it doesn't apply to single family residential, but the one guy maintained that sure, you could legally skip it, but you could also legally cover your floors with broken glass and keep anacondas in the baby room.)

Anyway, thinking of my dad today too since its his birthday. I left work around 10 pm so I didn't get a chance to call him :/