I don't know how I feel about it, although you're certainly right in terms of it being political. I personally like the whitelist and think it helps to boost projects which would otherwise maybe be overlooked, and additionally, doesn't allow one project with a very small number of crunchers to be awarded a disproportionate amount of the rewards.
I may be getting some technical pieces wrong though which might affect my judgement.
In any event though, let's have a conversation! Upvoted for visibility! Thanks for laying out all these thoughts.
Thanks for the open mind!
In theory, "very small number of crunchers" is one of those metrics that could result in an automatic delisting / greylisting. E.g., if a project runs for X hours / days and doesn't gain N% of the network, then exclude it. Or maybe a project has to have N% of the crunchers running it for a certain amount of time before it's automatically included, to prevent people from spawning little zombie projects just to steal GRC from the network.
Surely we can figure out how to do this without requiring a human to press the button.:)