I read your links, and I think @neo is right in much of what he says.
I personally think that shunning the nodes when not delivering the chunks they are responsible for, is “too little and too late” a measure.
What I’d rather see is possibly something along the lines @mav suggested years ago. Filling the nodes to the capacity with something that could be asked for in regular intervals. And if not returned, nodes are shunned: Proof Of Storage prototype?
I don’t get it. How, in any scenario, it would be more profitable to run rather less than more nodes in a given HD space?
To be fair, my work includes photography and large scale 3D modeling. And I’d better have had a new laptop a couple years ago. 