Power outages? Is that the best you can come up with? Can you say UPS?

UPS don't outlive power outages caused by snow or any weather related outage. UPS will give you 2-5 minutes on a powerful system, maybe 15-20 minutes with no monitor attached and a huge battery.

The only thing you talk about are vague, boggeyman negatives.

Actually they are very real realities.

the node would have to do a 3-4 day reply (which, BTW, to my understanding, is being drastically reduced as we speak . . .).

Again, you fail to actually understand. Witnesses are here to protect the blockchain, sure you can use a snapshot in get back up and running in an hour or two, but during a hard fork and an emergency you won't have snapshots and will need to do a full replay and it is critical that core witnesses are back online as fast as possible.