Ha, yeah it could be any number of reasons but I think there needs to be a "cut off" - as the original post said, it must be so disheartening for a new witness running the latest version to see there's people who've been inactive for 18 months or more that is higher up than them!
Needs to be tidied up for sure but no idea how to go about asking for these changes to be made.
No worries. Quochuy is a dev and probably a lot of other devs read his posts. I bet they already know this issue but it is not a priority atm because the first HIVE Hardfork is about to be done and has to be tested.
This should be a quick fix for one of the subsequent hardforks.
Thanks for the info about the next HF. I know there's a lot more pressing issues at hand right now so happy to wait for these first important issues to be addressed and tested then looking in to other matters after.
For always up to date info about HIVE, check the HIVE discord server.
https://discord.gg/nKmuPH
Unfortunately I'm not a blockchain developer. Maybe @netuoso can give us some light on the topic.