Love your talks about witnesses on the BitShares network and the testnet. It would be very beneficial for the network to maybe reward new user for supporting the testnet and maybe get them into the kinks of the network.
It will make them earn a reputation amongst the network and when they finally become a witness on the real network after a few months you can look back and say that this user are really good and proven to be able to support the network.
The fact that you guys had a witness node with 8000+ missed blocks because it was misconfigured in the beginning will make people have less fait in them, but also on the network.