as suggested in the livestream, idea would be to focus on "fixing" the software as to so that running full nodes would not have such high RAM requirements, drastically lowering node expenditures. IMHO this is truly a way forward. With bitshares there is a "node selection" setting based on latency. This could be a way forward as more nodes become available and there would be a static "discovery file" for those nodes (hosted on github) which could be integrated in third party apps or proxies. In Steemit.com / settings one could manually pick a node, or get the node with lowest latency automatically connected.
good one - sounds feasible and a realistic outlook