My friend was a candidate and was not able to pass validation this time. The people who already know the project, will not be run away by this, but new users will. If you have to wait 2 weeks between each epoch, it should be 100% usable during the epoch validation. Honestly, I think the 2 week thing is way too long anyway. Maybe 1 week epochs would be better. I understand the team is convinced the 2 week thing is good..... so maybe when someone clones this they can do shorter epochs.
In past epochs happened on few days span and it all depends on number of nodes in the network. It is even predicted to go up to one moth in future when network grows more.
Until sharding is completed it would not be a good idea to accept a lot of new people with shorter periods of validations, as we saw in two previous incidents.
Something can potentially change after sharding is implemented.