Much have been said. Adding my 2 cents here:
2 - Increase the number of public slots from 320 - this will definitely help, but I think we should release the hounds and let the network carry the weight of signing / voting as well, sooner than later. Give them the responsibility to learn to crawl before they run. The UX for the Staking Dashboard is completely separate from the core protocol and can be tweaked to de-emphasize some things (like Uptime) in the early days, and emphasize others (promotions of newly elected validators) at different times
3 - Helping smaller validators solve signing issues - the docs are well written enough and yet we have seen some newer validators struggle with this. We can introduce a coaching plan of some sort, pairing up some validators with others. Mutual rewards will appear over time. It could be just be a pipe dream.
6 - Marketing promotion for smaller validators - mentioned above, “Let’s do this!”
I have a new one to propose, which is
7 - Introduce the concept of Re-Delegations - to help
a) boost the confidence of delegators to be early adopters with an ability to do-over once every X epochs (say, we could throttle the re-delegation assignments to not allow for more than one re-delegation every 7 epochs for the same amount of tokens secured with the newly redelegated validator)… and
b) hold validators accountable - if validators promote themselves as one and then all of a sudden either run a poorly performing node, or raise fees with no notice, or maybe just leaves the network haphazardly, there is an immediate recourse that’s possible. posted the discussion here as well – Staking Redelegations
Thanks again for pitching in your mindshare here and focusing yet again on making Harmony better and stronger over time!