I'm another who thinks we need to expand the number of witnesses. I'd go for a doubling or so, but I get the impression that there is a certain prerequisite technical knowledge level required, and that's the main reason for hesitancy on the part of "the status quo". There's surely important infrastructure overhead as well. I can appreciate the arguments in the name of caution for the sake of network security. One idea I've seen mentioned that I would get excited about as a short term, stopgap measure would be reforming the selection process by making it more representative of the choice of current active users. That means that all 'stale votes', votes made years ago by people who are no longer around, automatically decay and 'fall off' after a stipulated period of time, for example. That in itself would shake things up pretty well. Of course, the shock to the system would be mitigated by a democratically 'weighted HP' vote, but the shake-up caused by the need to replace all those lost stale votes would not go unnoticed by any means. This necessarily would lead us to 'campaigns' and perhaps a better education for all concerned regarding who is doing what. The process would be very positive for HIVE, I would think. What with all the hype surrounding "governance" these days, here we've got it built in already so why not flaunt it as well as use it?

This is one of the things I've been reflecting on for a while but kind of had on the back burner until HF24 is completely out of the way - another impression I have: that I'm not alone in that temporary laidback attitude - and I think perhaps the priority issue to be dealt with once we get back to moving forward. The physical break with STEEMIT had a big cost, probably much bigger than most of us realize.

Thinking about it, we really haven't done too badly. We've set the foundation in place! Now it's time to build!