I think one thing that is important to keep in mind on the topic of "when do I break this rule vs borrow" is that I think it matters how much notice you're willing to engage in. Speaking at a purely personal level, if I want to borrow Power Grid, it would be with a couple days notice and I'd either bus over or meet them somewhere for a hand off. Generally, once I want to borrow something, I'm willing to make some effort for it vs just hoping they bring it to a meetup. If I was driving 45min to get to a gaming location though, I'd rethink all of this...
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We borrow like 90% of the time. In an overall group of approximately 35 people (and maybe 25 households), we strive for an overlap of about 2-3 copies except on really popular stuff (e.g. Just One) where I think there are 7 copies across the group. When we sell games, we give each other the first option so it doesn't leave the group and if nobody picks it up, then it leaves at a convention or sold on BGG. I think we have one, maybe two copies of Catan or Power Grid in the group, and a lot of games we just have one copy of.
My go to would have been Deception: Murder in Hong Kong which I think needs between 6 and 9 players to really shine, but discounting social deduction, I'd look at Captain Sonar. The downside there is the player count is brittle... I do agree with @Zipheir that Bohnanza works well from 4-7. If 6 is acceptable, Point Salad is fine and that means you don't have to sort cards as you use them all.
Really, after 6 people, we break up into two groups. I mean, sometimes we break up at 6...
6 Nimmt has gotten an extensive amount of play in my group and I think I can explain it from scratch in 45 seconds.
I'll echo some suggestions and add some more. Before that, there is something to note about many coops; you can divide them into two groups, first, could I play by myself (e.g. Pandemic and controlling multiple characters), and second, that they require multiple people because of hidden information (e.g. Hanabi). Almost all of my coop suggestions fall into the later.
Just One - @roarmalf pointed this one out, and I second it. This has gotten an extensive amount of play in our group.
Quirky Circuits - This is a real time game for the action allocation portion where you play your cards. More players is better IMHO. You're playing cards to program the little roomba/robot that is cleaning the house and then you flip them up to see where it actually goes.
Rosetta: The Lost Language - I think it's a marriage of Mysterium (coop) and First Contact (competitive) as a small box coop. Incredibly group dependent, but there is a print and play copy (of the first edition) available for $5 from a different publisher who is going to do a second edition in the future. this one scales well once you get 3 total people as a bottom threshold and players can enter and drop out of the game (other than the story teller) at will which is a nice feature. Some people will like this more than Mysterium (and it has 1/4th of the rules), some will like Mysterium more.
Magic Maze - Kasper Lapp has a new one called Gardeners that I really like, but it's not available widely yet where as his earlier game that is quite similar called Magic Maze is. Players can't communicate except by tapping a wooden peg in front of another player to alert them that they should be the one doing the next move. otherwise it's unstructured as to who should be taking the next turn (oh, and it's real time).
I uninstalled it on Wednesday. Reddit had become a time sink for me more than something of benefit, and unless Apollo is going to do a federated app, I'm back to just checking in periodically when I think about it (which is fine really).