I've previously stated that there does seem to be some merit to toknormal's argument however I also think he's overestimating its importance.

The majority of the value in any coin/token is derived from pure speculation and with good reason. Any crypto that achieves or even comes close to mass adoption will make holders multi-millionaires at the very least...

Saying there's real world value to mining I'm not sure is 100% true. It's somewhat a mirage. It's a system of busy work to create an arm's race to get rewards and fees. But there's nothing inherently valuable with mining beyond protecting it from 51% attacks. The same rewards get generated regardless of the hash rate. In most POW coins as long as the hash rate is sufficiently high enough that one group can't get 51% of the hash rate to double spend (and violate other rules) then the chain is considered secure. But we even see with ETC that despite the most recent 51%/double spend attack, the price already recovered (perhaps the speculation here is that once ETH goes POS, ETC will be the top Ethash chain).

For every POW chain that's considered more competitive than DASH by toknormal (a total of 8?) there are 100's of other POW coins that are not as competitive, dying or already dead.

Now, let's try to measure 'competitiveness' by taking snapshots of the marketcap from the beginning of the year until now (note: didn't include ADA as I don't think this is POW)

	BTC	ETH	BCH	BSV	LTC	XMR	DASH	ZCASH	ETC
Jan 5, 2020	$134,469,548,249	$14,875,569,430	$4,080,035,773	$2,003,156,469	$2,778,396,525	$940,587,960	$476,326,526	$260,715,783	$570,853,943
Aug 14, 2020	$217,415,449,393	$49,233,254,181	$5,444,846,261	$3,929,592,983	$3,711,626,608	$1,615,209,788	$891,430,846	$834,949,487	$802,247,004
	(+161%)	(+331%)	(+133%)	(+196%)	(+133%)	(+172%)	(+187%)	(+320%)	(+141%)

As you can see DASH is #4 among this group of 9 POW coins for YTD gains, so not the most competitive, but not the least either.

I restate that I believe the market cycle has more to do with a coins 'competiveness' rather than toknormal's theory of masternodes getting too much.

That said, I won't completely discount that there might be something there to look at.

Perhaps trustless masternode shares could be implemented and the collateral be increased maybe from 1000 DASH to 1200 DASH to keep ROI high enough and not have too many masternodes.

Or perhaps instead of trustless masternodes, interest savings could be implemented where maybe people can 'lock up' loose DASH to get 2% or so. Some restrictions like, only up to 200 loose DASH can be locked up per masternode and this 2% would have to come from the masternode reward.

Another thing to look at is the reality that people like to own whole things. People might think BTC is too expensive and since they can't have a whole one will buy some altcoins instead. While it might be a good feature that DASH is scarce and has low coin count, this is also the same thing that can lead to centralization and price volatility. People are ecstatic with the huge upswings in price of DASH during a bull market but then panic with the huge price dumps during a bear market. I think something like LTC and XMR are less volatile simply because there are more coins and likely more individual holders. We see stock splits happen when individual shares become too expensive. It might make sense at some point to consider a 'coin split' where 1 old DASH is exchanged for 10 new DASH. Where 1 old DASH was too expensive for someone to buy any before, they might go ahead and buy 5 new DASH. Overall the price goes up with this psychological trick.

Anyways, just throwing ideas out there. Perhaps, toknormal, one or more of these forms the beginnings of a solution you can propose to the DAO to address the problems you see.