Thanks for giving an overview of the ratings, Chris, and moreover for subscribing so we can keep up to date. I have some of the same questions you do about what all goes into the final letter grade.
Specifically I'd like to see more sophistication in what those letter grades mean vis a vis mainstream financial analysis with price targets and expectations for a the quarter/year/roadmap milestone. I realize this is a lot of work but it's a paid publication and the expectation should be more like a trade magazine than a "newsletter" for ~US$500 per year.
Regarding the Lightning Network commentary, what you've described as an algorithm to load balance is totally feasible. There is an algorithm to find the lowest-cost path between two nodes in a network and we're using it right now ;) The whole internet operates this way - for fun use the terminal/command line and type dig <some website or server IP> or in Windows I think it's tracert of the same and you'll get a readout of all the "hops" in the shortest path. The innovation here would be the ability to create a shorter path by having some overlay of traffic/connections. Funny enough, this is a problem I've dealt with at work - there is active research and some heuristic based approaches to "client-side" load-balancing. Essentially, each node could have information about a subset of the network and keep track of latencies from previous interactions. Then just pick at random or actively select for below-median latencies. The Lightning folks could adapt this approach to periodically scan chunks of the network for underutilized nodes and self-load balance by automatically creating/tearing down connections.
That's hand-wavy but the underpinnings are all there and have real world implementations. I'm not sure that this gets around KYC rules or even gives you plausible deniability - you're still operating a server whose purpose is to act as a payment channel. I'm not a lawyer but I don't see how that saves you. Anyway, just my two cents and hopefully that heartens you that such a thing could be done and regardless of the KYC circumvention it would be a great idea to have a self-balancing system.