Yeah, that's what I don't get. If you're going to speculate, and you don't want to keep funds on an exchange, it's perfectly natural to want to transfer the liquid funds to a wallet. But it's not very likely for them to power up. I don't think the power-down schedule crosses a speculator's mind in any way.

If there's any barrier to speculation, it's the lack of wallet addresses, not the power-down schedule. Adding these wallet-only accounts would probably be less trivial to shoehorn into the next hardfork, though.