Hi @biasnarrative! As accurate as usual - Mother Nature gave you hawk eyes and owl mind ;-) I totally agree with you, and would even propose:
the Reward Pool access to be suspended for the top 20 Witnesses,
AND the block production algorithm to be reformed so that the first 50 Witnesses receive an equal reward per period of time (I suppose there already has been plenty of debates around it, haha). Actually the Witnesses I most have talked with are positioned between ranks 40 and 100, and as far as I've seen nor the hardware installation they need (and their investment in it) nor the workload they direct to running their seed and to inform/assess the Community are so drastically inferior to the "Top 20" as their rewards are...
I have thought about your first point and agree.
Your second point could affect hard fork updates. Not sure though. I have thought about making everybody on the witness pool random, and the higher your rank, the more chance you have of getting it
As far as the hard forks are concerned, aren't they the result of a simple majority votation between the first 20 Witnesses, that could be extended to the first 50 (promoting a more democratic base for that hard fork process)?