This proposal feels like a a good trade-off in the short term. Transcoders like @0x88(Transcoder Campaign: 0x88 Hyper Transcoder) and @dillchen(Transcoder Campaign: Commonwealth Transcoder) will be included in the active set, and the lower activation threshold is good for more decentralization of the network.
I expect the newly opened slots to be quickly filled up due to the increasing awareness of staking opportunities in general. Due to the large % of increase in gas cost for initializeRound(), I don’t expect the numbers to increase fast enough to capture all demand for new nodes. So it is important for a protocol mechanism update to happen in order to allow hundreds to thousands of nodes on the network.
Looking at the future of the network, especially around the launch of Streamflow, I expect there to be some turnover in the active set as the responsibility of a Livepeer node will be more about providing transcoding capacity to the network. I’m looking forward to that day, when the Livepeer network can provide transcoding service at 1/10 of the price comparing to other cloud transcoding services.