The testnet needs a public condenser and users should receive a notification as an invite to join the test condenser to help generating some test traffic.
Steemit Inc devs should always write unit tests for their code, I’m not sure why the negative RC or the fact that it was possible for https://steemd.com/@interfecto2 to claim so many free accounts while having 0 SP wasn’t caught by some unit test.
Maybe if backup witnesses were not paid peanuts then we could also participate and spin up some test nodes.