If the key issue you mentioned means the "VPS" problem, maybe you have missed the main idea of the paper or maybe I missguided you by my previous posts, I am sorry for that. Although I have a preference for it because it's objective and seems "elegant" to me, "Network Dispersity" is just one of the abilities to "accumulate stakes". If it fails, the security and fairness will not be affected because:
1.
If countermeasures are not taken, and in the end, if the miners want to win more votes, they will need to arrange more super gatherer nodes globally
And the competition of accumulate stakes is still fair and objective.
Even if the accumulating process is subjective, you could consider it as a sort of "public" DPoS protocol in this respect.
2.
most of the stakes are owned by the richest users who will tend to accumulate their stakes by themselves and work alone.
It means that the chains will remain strong whether the "network dispersity" works or not, and the motivation of breaking the rules of network dispersity is low because of the negative ROIs.
Please enlighten me, what is the main idea of the paper, because as far as I can tell, the main idea is stake weighting with "Network Dispersity" added on top, which has horrible sybil attack problems?