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Also, inactive or disabled witnesses are not scheduled to produce blocks and are therefore completely ignored by the blockchain.

The complaint about the dead witnesses being in the top 50 was that they prevented active witnesses from being seen in the witness voting page on steemit.com. This would be resolved by just updating the witness voting page along the lines of the design which I already suggested that shows more witnesses than just 50:
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@ura-soul/suggestion-improved-witness-voting-page-for-steemit-com