I agree that the level of knowledge about witnessing and running nodes needs to improve and broaden.

This is precisely why I am both calling for far better documentation by Hive devs and encouraging people to run nodes on owned equipment, physically located with them.

If you have a witness running beside you at your desk and you can see the logs running all the time (and immediately when they go down) you are much more connected to being a witness than having it run on some "cloud" server somewhere.

You are more likely to learn how it works. That is certainly what I am trying to do.

According to @someguy123 you can even run a witness on a 4Gb RAM machine.

8Gb RAM with a 4/8 core CPU should be plenty sufficient for a backup witness.
My main witness will have 24Gb & 6 core CPU and my API node 128Gb and 6/12 core CPU & 2x1Tb RAID0 NVME.

Why do you suggest that I would be missing blocks with this setup if I made it to a top20 witness slot? I can always add a second backup witness node to provide further redundancy if necessary. I've got heaps of PC parts lying around. :-)