If you increase the value of everyone's holdings, no one is getting scammed. It's totally different than decreasing the value of everyone's holdings. Even you must understand this.
You're only taking into account half the picture. Increase the value of everyone's holdings now, on the dollar of every future investor. Decreasing the value of everyone's holdings now, not on the dollar of every future investor, but your own.
Even you should be able to see this.
Can you explain the "take that money from them" part further, I'm not getting what you're trying to say. There are people with < 1000 DRK pooling together to run nodes btw. If there aren't enough of them to your liking, it's because the rewards are not good enough as the price of the coin is still very low. I'd expect the amount of people doing that to increase further if the price would let's say 10x.
Well, people hand the exchanges thousands. In turn, the exchanges "take that money from the current masternode operators". Because the exchange doesn't have to purchase these coins out right, yet still will set up masternodes to collect/siphon money (from the MN reward structure) from the other people that have actually paid for their coins, they are encouraged to steal from these people. Not a good business model.
How many nodes have been created by pooled money? Is it even anywhere enough to change the numbers in the figure I posted? Is this service managed by one person? The people pooling these coins, do not own the nodes directly, do they? It is safe to say that the ownership of the masternode is more correctly described as being under control of the manager?
There won't be anywhere near enough of them so long as the collateral required is 1k, because even doubling the amount now still only gives less than 20 people minimum that could potentially collude and have control of >50% of the masternode network.
If the only argument to keeping the 1k number is to prevent 'network chatter' then the method is just not scalable to a real world application.