A guy who doesn't live far from us was getting rid of some of his bigger trees... so we decided to take this maple off of his hands.
It has a couple of major design issues.. the trunk after the first branch is quite straight. The first and the secon branches are nearly at the exact same position. The internodes are quite large. I do like the nebari, and I like the tree..
Next year it's going into a modern bonsai substrate... this guy grows almost all of his trees in regular soil. You can see some of the damage from the sun this summer,which is unfortunate, as it looks like the fall coloring would be quite nice.

Any ideas, suggestions? Can anything be done with the trunk/branches?

Well... you already said it. You like the tree. So do I. The overall picture is that of a nice tree, regardless the flaws. In nature, trees also don't follow the rules.
The two branches are not exactly at the same position. You might be able to improve it a bit by tilting the tree to the left (second image).
You could also make the whole branch and the side branches of probably the left one come down a bit using guy wires.

You could remove a branch, but personally, I'd be a bit reluctant to do that.

I like it very much, the way it is.
The two first "T" branches would be my main concern, but as the shape of the tree is nice and in proportion, I'd leave as it is.

Just an idea: what about shortening the left branch a little bit? just to create more weight on one side.

I don't want to remove the branch either, as I'm not sure how easily this tree will backbud. once I get it in a better soil mix, and work with it for a while, I might see what can happen.

To me, it feels that you do not loose anything important by removing the bottom-left branch, to be honest.

THe picture is a little small of the full tree but..

So we did end up getting some fall colors after all.

Nice!

this guy leafed out pretty heavily this year, and I had to do a trim... I'm thinking I should have taken a bit more, but I did do a repot this year with a significant root-prune, so I didn't want to cut back to the wood, or defoliate...

Looks happy enough!

Today was barber day here too

The fall colors on this maple were much better than last year thankfully my wife was able to get a picture before the leaves disappeared.