Critical care is pretty cool! It requires an extra year of fellowship after training, so the additional commitment isn't as damning as some other fellowship tracks. You get to care longitudinally for the sickest people in the hospital, and if I do say so myself, anesthesiologists make the best intensivists due to how much time we spend training to manage catastrophes. The more long-term, maintenance care is what the fellowship is good for.
Unfortunately, if you're looking to avoid academic practice, your options may be limited. At least in my area, anesthesia-led ICUs basically don't exist outside of large tertiary care centers. In fact, I don't know of any, other than the two major academic institutions in town. Maybe that's different elsewhere and someone else can weigh in accordingly? My hospital would support a dedicated ICU team, but they're just now transitioning to that and are using pulm docs. You might be able to wrangle a tele ICU position, as I think that's what more remote, smaller locations are moving toward these days.
Also a bummer is that you're probably going to take a pay hit to focus on critical care. (That would likely not be the case for telehealth, but I digress.) When there are pulmonologists available to work for $300k-350k, it's tough for hospitals - especially smaller ones - to justify the cost differential to pay you anesthesia money. You might find a group somewhere that rotates people through the ICU and the OR as part of their contract with the hospital, so the pay doesn't suffer, but again, I don't know of any places locally that function that way.
Matching is going to be a strange beast from here on out. Anesthesia has been absurdly competitive in the last 2 matches compared to how it was historically. With Step 2 presumably being the new Step 1 in terms of sorting competitiveness, that'll absolutely be critical to score well on, as you say. Research is always a plus to your app, but if you're content to match in the Midwest or mid south, I'm going to wager that you're fine without it, changes in specialty competitiveness notwithstanding. Otherwise, just button up your app the best you can. Knock out good clinical grades, get decent letters, prep smartly for your interviews, and apply broadly. Oh, and tell them I sent you! That'll get you matched, for sure.
