Thanks a lot for this breakdown, it is insightful to see it from someone like you who has been in the top 20 and then out. I agree with you regarding witness vote decay. Also, I think it can lead to lots of problems, including potentially jeopardizing the network's security by requiring people to perform voting every once in a while. In the IT world, when someone places a vote on something, they expect that to stay in place until they make a change. Vote decay will, I think, lead to less and less people renewing their voting so the governance participation in effect will decrease, making it easier to overtake the network.
What are your thoughts on removing the ability to proxy witness votes? It seems like people proxying leads to more centralization of power to those that get selected as a proxy. Whereas without proxying everyone has to decide who they vote for.
I still see it as a useful feature, but ultimately the responsibility falls on stakeholders to use it properly - just the same as witness voting.
There is danger of people who just "proxy and forget" or cases where a proxy uses their power in ways that the users who trusted it to them would disagree with. If people are going to proxy their vote to someone, it is my view that they need to take the responsibility to at least periodically monitor and check in with their proxy.
I mostly agree with this but I would definitely include proxy setting in the "lost account" expiration feature. I suppose one could make the case it should have a longer lifespan, but still should have some lifespan shorter than forever.