1st advice: Hire an attorney. Leases are contracts to pay A LOT OF MONEY. Your broker (if they do a lot of leasing which MOST DO NOT) can help with the deal points but you really need an attorney that does a lot of lease work to go over the lease.
I have no problem with % rent if the % makes sense. Bottom line, if your occupancy cost comes in under 10% of sales rent will not be your problem. Look for a base or “minimum rent” that is below market value and a % rent with a “natural break point”.
For example, on 1000 square foot location, if market rent in your area is $20 per foot the annual rent would be $20,000. If your “minimum rent” was $16,000 and your break point for percentage rent at 8% was 200K in sales you would have a “natural break” as 8% of 200K is 16K. You would then pay 8% of sales above the 200K level meaning you would have to do another 50K before your rent rose to the market. You want the % to be calculated on the longest possible period of sales, hopefully anually, certainly not monthly. Quarterly is OK, semi anually is better. Why does it work? Because you benefit if sales are soft and the LL benefits if the location produces traffic.
I have quite a bit of experience with leases having done site work for a national retailer around the US and I do some lease consulting on the side (including for another poster on this board). In my experience, the locations where I worked with % leases and was paying a lot of % rent were the best locations we had and the best LL relationships we had. Everybody wins.
Triple net leases are the standard. As long as they exclude capital items and have basic protections for the tenant I think they are fair. For a LL to do it another way, they will need to raise the rent to cover the unexpected.
Getting a couple months off on rent during the year… Why would a LL do this? You might get them to spread the same anual rent over 10 months, but in the end, getting a return on investment for the value of the building is what the LL needs and is fair.
Deposit: if you have solid credit and are willing to sign a personal guaranty I don’t see why there should be a deposit at all. Absent either of those things, two months is pretty fair.
As some of the other posters have implied, there are several money buckets in a lease. Some in your favor, others in the LL’s favor. Be sure you are paying attention to all of them. Sometimes you can get or save $$ in places you might not expect.
