I would support witness vote decay. I also really like that you wouldn't just have support removed all at once, but that it would begin diminishing after a set period of time. Because things change very quickly in the crypto world, I would think a shorter time period would be helpful. A year is a long time to be gone. I haven't even been on the platform for a year! We also don't want witnesses to only be looking for votes, so I think six months would be a good in between starting point.

I didn't even realize that 17 witness consensus was all that was needed. This definitely needs to get fixed. Like you said, not that any people would, but someone could. I support having a lot of witness votes to give, because it gives more potential to help the smaller witnesses. We also don't want to have too high of a number of witnesses needed to make a change, or critical updates could be delayed. I think that your "Option C" could be a good solution to that.

Thanks for creating this space to discuss the ideas!