For me, houserules are aimed at shoring up the game where it's most inconvenient for the game, promoting a style of play or outcome second, then addressing balance third. The reasoning is simple, inconveniences waste table time, but can likely be resolved in a number of relatively simple rules(roll consolidation, skill consolidation, obviating wealth tracking).
Promoting playstyle meanwhile just acts to set game tone, whether to raise/lower lethality, mess with social interactions, enforce/ignore morality or to promote investigative play. It's of course, fraught with hazards, odds are this will have further knock on effects on balance, or require it's own subsystem(with it's own learning curve).
Improving game balance is last, because of the simple issue of 'where the hell do I stop?'. Game balance issues are systematic, changes are usually complex and interact with other problems, while also being harder to remember. At some point it goes past being a houserule into a fantasy heartbreaker project, which is further threatened by nobody being as good at balancing a game for both fun and challenges as they like to imagine.
Homebrew now is easier. I(or one of the people I collaborate with) have a seed idea, I spend my idle time fleshing out the idea for fun, then eventually clean it up, consolidate and post it somewhere. Or it sits in a notepad file/my head/chat log for months and vanishes into the huge sea of orphaned ideas.
