One thing that bothers me a lot is that not all top 20 witnesses are active contributors and developers of the Hive protocol, at least they don't seem to. Blocktrades seem to do a good job, but that person, or that group of people, seem, from a far, to do most, if not all, of the development.
The top 20 make more than enough to literally pay at least a couple of devs to dedicate to working on the protocol specifically.
Our protocol is a great feat, fast, cheap and efficient one, but we kinda take it for granted that stuff will work well forever.
For instance, if we need to implement sharding, like Ethereum will, to increase throughput and storage and other technicals, could we do it? I think we don't seem to have the amount of brains for such a big feat.
Although it may be in the best interest of the top 20 witnesses that few can work with the protocol, so that instead of a consensus being reached for being straightforwardly good ,it is instead reached because there is no competition and no alternatives for the path which to follow, this consensus.
Blocktrades is a guy called Dan Notestein - as I understand it he runs a dev company and he has team working on the chain software - the second place GTG I know is very knowledgeable - obviously howo is paid to work on Deving - I'm not sure about the rest - I think a few might get their Trades votes because of what they've developed on Hive - Marky springs to mind - rather than the deeper development.
It's quite possible that some of BlockTrades Dev team are in those T20 witnesses, I don't know how many people he employs, but it would make sense.
But some just seem to be along for the ride, you're right. It's a good idea for a post 'what do the Top 20 witnesses actually do'...?
I mean IF they're not FULL TIME deving Hive, why are they in the T20?
Then again aren't governance and Deving different, the later funded by the DAO?
Oh they all vote for each other, and no I wouldn't expect much investment because of this!