While I think 32 Eth is rather high, it's not an astronomical sum by any means. It *will* exclude a lot of lower net worth investors who might otherwise be interested in staking it, and that's unfortunate. I don't know why the new pos protocol can't make Eth stake-able like other pos coins, where there is no minimum. I'm very interested in staking, but I can't say I have 32 Eth right now and it is a lot of money for me to invest in a single coin.
The best solution would be to lower the minimum ETH required for staking in order to encourage the average person to support the blockchain as much as possible.
That would be nice, but I bet they're not going to back down now.