Respectfully I disagree. Nodes in and of themselves don't actually do much that is useful other than seeding blocks, and you really only need a few nodes to do that.

The reason I exclude paid nodes is not that one kind of node is better than the other, it is that I'm looking at volunteer nodes as an indicator of participation. If you pay people to do something, sure they'll do it, but it loses value as an indicator of anything other than the rate of payment, or at least it can't be viewed as an apples-to-apples comparison from one coin to another.

You make a valid point that the cost of running a node is function of the amount of activity on the network in terms of bandwidth, storage, etc. so maybe that should be considered as part of the indicator along with whether people run nodes or not. If I had to guess that would probably increase the scores of DOGE and BTC and decrease the others.