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Here's what I've gone with:

* pistols and SMGs will suffer only a -1 penalty (rather than -2) to un-aimed fire if within Short range

* pistols and SMGs will suffer only a -2 penalty (rather than -3) for firing while in Close Combat

It hasn't come up yet to test, though.

Something like this seems reasonable to give pistols, SMGs and in my opinion carbines as well some advantages and a reason to use them other than "can't find anything better".
My first thoughts are
- Close combat
- General -3 penalty
- SMG/Carbine -2 penalty
- Pistols -1 penalty
Unless I've misread something horribly wrong, close combat is someone pretty much on top of you with fists/melee weapons. So for shorter weapons it makes sense to reduce the penalty and for pistols, which you can pretty much squeeze between the attackers ribs, the minimal penalty should account for the struggle. If you'd want to really get in depth, you could do like a strenght contest or something to clear a shot, but it's so niche I don't think there's a point complicating things.

- Quick shot
- General penalty -2
- SMG/Carbine -1 (within short range)
From my experience between a G3 and G36C (and some SMGs) the target acquisition is night and day for shorter ranges. For pistols not that much to be honest. Unless you're a proper gunslinger I don't see "snap shots" happening. This modifier should probably be removed for "close combat" cases as well, not sure if that was stated in the rules or not, but at that point you probably won't be in a position to "aim" (by which I mean properly aim) anyways. I'm considering the "quick shots" to be the the "over the sights" kind instead of the african warlord pay and spray kind.

As for the other points in the OP, 1 and 2 seem pretty reasonable, probably going to implement those for myself as well unless the base rules are changed (and hope they don't throw things off balance). For 3 I think the issue lies not within the hunting, but the ammo dice rules. Actually the hunting situation makes more sense to me than the general ammo dice. In the case of the hunt these people probably are not experienced hunters and as such I can see them either missing a shot, hitting a non-vital spot etc. and as such wasting ammo (even with a scoped rifle). Whereas in a battle I'd think that people shooting semi-auto weapons and especially bolt-action weapons can bring themselves to reassess the situation after each shot and as such should not be forced into spending an ammo die for each shot. I mean it's not like you black out after the first shot and find you've gone through the whole magazine of your bolt action rifle a few seconds later. You make a concious decision whether to take a well aimed shot or suppress the enemy positon and then act on it.
If again I'm not misinterpreting the rules, then even rolling a 6 on the ammo die for weapons with magazine capacity of 5 or less just empties your gun and provides absolutely no bonuses. As such I think leaving bolt-action and semi-auto weapons the option to take a single shot is reasonable. Maybe play around with the semi-auto case if the user is inexperienced or "green", panic is a thing, but it's much easier to panic and empty a semi-auto weapon than a bolt-action weapon.

Agreed that there should be an option. But to prevent becoming the default option, there should either be a penalty applied, or it should require a specialization.

As I see it missing out on the additional hits for the ammo dice is already the "penalty". For bolt action rifles taking the d6 down to d3 may be a solution (either have the ammo success be just on 6 or both 5 and 6, and divide ammo used by 2), but I can't imagine someone casually unloading 6 rounds from a bolt action rifle in the span of 5-10 seconds (including the ridiculous fire rates of lee-enfield rifles in the hands of trained shooters) and contrary to semi-auto weapons I'd imagine someone green and more likely to panic would have more trouble working the bolt that fast.
And in case of the double barrel shotgun in 5/6 cases you'd empty both barrels, speaking of which has a ROF of 2 compared to the 1 of the pump action shotgun. I'm feeling like either I'm missing an important piece of the puzzle here or something is kind of off with the alpha rules. If the ammo dice successes count even after running out of ammo, then ok, in some cases it does seem to make sense, but the rules state you remove the dice that go over the remaining ammo count so I'm kind of lost as to what's the point there.
To clarify I do like the ammo dice as a concept, in the heat of the battle you do run dry suddenly. The base ruleset seems quite solid as well. However there seems to be very little distinction between the pros and cons of each weapon class. I mean yes, in real life anything you can use to shoot your enemy is a solid weapon, but there are distinct ups and downs to each that manifest in extremes. Throughout my service I wished I had a nice intermediate cartridge bullpup like the FN2000 when I had to drag my 5kg of G3 along. In CQB it would have had many advantages, but out in the marshes and woods I'd still rather the full sized battle rifle that can punch through trees. A machinegun can turn the tide of the battle, but only if it's set up in a favorable position and can cover the unit. A sniper rifle can terrorize a larger unit for hours if it's got a good position. Shotguns are one of the most versatile firearms around with their different types of ammo.
There are so many nuances, in the end it's hard to home in on the sweet spot between complexity and ease of access. In my eyes this is the perfect position to implement optional rules, I will never have the capacity to figure out which homebrew changes are balanced and which are not. I mean I could write up a simulation and let it run for a while, but I'm really not that invested at the moment, painting miniatures taking up most of the free time. But whatever the case, I'm hoping for a solid set of base rules from free league and everyone can go their own way with homebrew rules from there, and seeing some of the input so far, someone will probably come up with a statistical report of what and where is acceptable to implement to not throw the system off balance.

Tomas said (somewhere) that they need to clarify that you can't get more hits that the number of bullets you actually have in the weapon. This makes me think that you never remove 'symbol' dice when you remove ammo dice (so you never remove ammo dice with hit or mishap results on them).
So if you fire a Colt Police Positive revolver using ROF 2, you can get three hits (if you have three bullets in it of course). Using ROF 2 will most likely empty the revolver but you can get more hits (and also a higher chance of a mishap).

They might have changed this in the beta of course (we will see soon).

In that case it does make more sense, however it still leaves the bolt action and single fire weapons in a weird spot. And as for the double barrel shotgun you could potentially score 3 hits with the ROF of 2, though in the case of mishap vs extra hit it's somewhat understandable. Still not sold in the bolt action case though.

In that case it does make more sense, however it still leaves the bolt action and single fire weapons in a weird spot. And as for the double barrel shotgun you could potentially score 3 hits with the ROF of 2, though in the case of mishap vs extra hit it's somewhat understandable. Still not sold in the bolt action case though.

They need to go through some weapon stats, yes. Something that Tomas said they will do.