Instead of swinging too far in the opposite direction, why not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_projection ? The northern latitudes are bigger in Robinson's projection than they are in real life, but you do need to refer to them pretty often, and they're not ridiculous like they are in Mercator.
(On further reading: the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winkel_tripel_projection looks a bit more 'stretched', but keeps the northern latitudes readable while not exaggerating their size.)