Sure I would prefer Bittrex over Poloniex or for just taking out your Steem to BTC, you can always use blocktrades.us, but nonetheless Poloniex is big and affects whole market.
As for workload, I think you misunderstood. I'm talking about my full API node. You can't run it on witness nodes, or rewriting it better: you shouldn't use witness nodes for anything other than just generating blocks.
Serving API and generating blocks are completely different things and require completely different setup.
Many of new wanna-be-witnesses do not even run their seed nodes so I doubt about their capability of running reliable full API nodes.
Sure, we don't need 200+ runner-up witnesses, 50-100 reliable runner up nodes are more than enough.
Ah thanks for clarifying that. But still, even for backup witnesses, the requirements will increase in the future and the developers need to solve that pending problem too, not just the full nodes.