A transparent and “clean” onboarding process should be defined. In my opinion the applicants should submit a form and the validators + foundation should select the new validators.
The form responses should be made public, and they should specify what they can bring to the table, and how they can/want help.
Most often big players don’t react fast… don’t care about governance/decentralization… you can see their involvement in terms of governance on all cosmos networks per example, and you see that they don’t even vote most of the time on governance proposals.
Smaller teams should be preferred instead of big “old” ones like Coinbase or Blockdeamon…although looks like Blockdeamon already know that they will have a slot.
The foundation has an obligation to defend the smaller Validators that belong to the current active set, the ones that are here from the beginning, the ones that are here when the chain breaks. We see foundation delegations with hundreds of millions of tokens to one Validator and for others 0, and this is not caring about decentralization. This is filling up his own pockets or their friends pockets.
In the last week foundation tokens have been unlocked… and what did we saw? all those “Anonymous” Validators getting tons of delegation, and the APY getting squeezed even more… The foundation and the foundation members should care about all the validators, and at least ensure that they don’t run under loss. I don’t believe that the validators ranked below 40th (In terms of voting power) have any kind of profit, but even so, they are still fighting, still helping and securing the network, and how did the foundation repays?