I agree with that sentiment. I am running under the assumption that Gridcoin is functional with the amount of processing power we currently have and that it will be sufficient for years to come.

As far as the M. J. Freedman & Mazières idea (link below), it sounds good to me. It also appears to include an algorithm for a emergence capturing mechanism in order to trigger the clusters into self-organizing behavior.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2901175_Sloppy_Hashing_and_Self-Organizing_Clusters

Good to know. That might mean that it has not been done yet. Add value to Gridcoin? Maybe we start simple, like just recording how much "Out:" is recorded in the Network Traffic tab of the Debug Console. We can assume that this approach would be fraught with questions. Such as "How do we not record the same network traffic twice?", "What do we do with this information?", and "Do we record downloads too?".