It is crazy to me how people focus on the block producer cap instead of the underlying consensus metric. If you remove the cap and let people produce proportionally to their approval, you would see a higher concentration of blocks produced by a smaller number of nodes.

Having 101 validators is FORCING the network to be MORE decentralized than the other consensus protocols, where 99% of blocks are produced by far fewer than 100 validators. As a stakeholder, your control over block producers is exactly proportional to your stake whereas in other systems it becomes unprofitable to validate unless you control huge amounts of the stake (or hash power in POW, or unique nodes on ripple UNL)

What is the goal of decentralization? It is to make it difficult for anyone but majority stake-vote to decide what the rules of ownership are. To protect the stakeholders from everyone else. The goal is not to make everyone feel like a part of the validation process and pay them for make-work.