Think of Vinaya as a legal codex. It is humanly impossible to keep all the law 100% of the time. In especially legistlatively productive regions like California it is in fact quite possible to unwittingly break a law or two every hour or so. Even the more important laws are broken from time to time because of the personal circumstances or lack of knowledge. It doesn’t means law is unimportant, should be reformed or shouldn’t be respected, it means that we should be realistic about how the laws are kept in real life, which is reflected in the idea of letter and spirit of the Law.
Besides, I think in that respect there is a lot to be learnt from Christian monks and nuns. I don’t know about the Catholic monastics, I’ve never had much cultural or personal contact with them, but the Orthodox monastics still largely follow the Rule of Basil the Great that outlines the monastic life in relatively broad lines while its particularities are up to each monastery or even monk to lay out. Even the more important things in this Rule are sometimes ignored for practical considerations. Moreover, the degree of your devotion to your monastic path is reflected in this Rule as well. This is essentially the reason why there are no monastic Order in the Christian East. I think it is quite a bit more regulated in the West, but don’t quote me on that.
While the Vinaya is much more detailed than the Orthodox Christian monastic rule, I think it can be approached in a similar way. There are some rules, like handling money, or even risking more serious offences like Sanghadisesa 2, that allow for ethical negotiating depending on 1) the reason why you could break them, 2) the degree of your devotion ot the monastic path. For a village monk it can be difficult to observe the Vinaya in its entirety, and his expectations for his practice can be quite modest. I think it would be dishonest and naïve to expect from him the same level of commitment as we do from hardcore forest monks. Of course, in that case we shouldn’t forgive the monastics for major offences like parajika or sanghadisesa ones, but even more importantly we should rather expect them to follow the Spirit of Vinaya if not its Letter.
To give you an example: as Bhante @sujato already said, it is not really a big deal to pay money for a bus ticket, because doing otherwise could be tricky in Europe or Australia. However, if you are ready to withstand these difficulties, it is even better, more power to you. In case of Sanghadisesa 2 imagine a pretty woman or handsome man drowning with no-one in vicinity to help except a monastic. Now, should this monk or nun risk commiting Sanghadisesa 2, which is, I’d say, quite possible under the circumstance? I would argue they must risk it. Should we reform Sanghadisesa 2? Not really. We shouldn’t even really reform the money rule, we should rather clearly realize why it was instated and when handling the money can be tolerated to a certain degree.
That could be also the middle way between reforming the Vinaya for Bhikkhunis and insisting on observing it to the letter. We talked about it on another thread. If we clearly understand why, e.g., the travelling rule was imposed in the first place I think many people would agree it makes a lot of sense even today. Yeah, it’s a bit repressive, but all Vinaya is; it’s easy to figure out for women on their own but I would argue that some people’s naïveté knows no limits or that a woman can have no idea the area she wants to walk in is dangerous, besides many other basic rules like parajika 1 also seem to be pretty easy to figure out on your own but it is still formalized. At the same time, non-systematic violations of minor rules like the acceptance to the Order of a married woman shouldn’t be a really big deal (if this married woman has the consent fo her spouse and possibly children, and I would expect the same from an ordinating married man) if they are duly confessed and unless there is a malicious intent behind it. I mean, the more strict nuns can choose to follow all or most of the Vinaya rules but if we want ‘village nuns’ to be a viable concept we should be as accepting as we are with monks.