Oh, that would not be a reason for me to unvote a top 20 witness, specially because the contributions can't be measured in only one dimension. However, I share your preferred approach, incentives over deterrents.
Regarding the overheads, the newest updates kind of take care of this. No longer will a ridiculous amount of ram be necessary to run a node, which would allow 32GB servers to do just fine.
These news are huge, or to be more with the times YUGE. So, I would love to see more of them embrace it once it launches. I will sure make some noise about it.