Do you have a position on trustless shared masternodes? This should increase the number of masternodes and therefore decrease the rewards any one masternode owner gets. I would assume that is something that you would have to back, right?
I'm not really a fan of trustless shared nodes. It basically means that any amount of Dash can be staked plus you're going to have collateral fragments coming and going all the time, so getting the node to stay up needs some kind of time lock on funds which means they're no longer instantly liquid like they are now. A nightmare for the protocol to manage plus it has to work out where the rewards go etc.
Trusted is better. I think this kind of pooled investment should be pushed into the financial services commercial sector where it belongs and can be properly administered according to the requirements of the local market and regulators, not in the protocol.
Trusted services have a place I suppose, but many get into crypto to have more freedom with their money. Plus I imagine most trusted services essentially don't vote.
I think the benefits of trustless shared masternodes would outweigh the downside.
Possible solution:
In the DashPay wallet, it could be presented as a savings account where you have to lock up your DASH for a term based on the masternode payment schedule. You could lock it up for 1 or more payments and once those are complete you'd get your initial locked amount back.
All DASH locked in the savings account would be pooled together, allowing for individual terms to end at the same time as taking down the least amount of masternodes due to the reduction of pooled collateral. People who want to run masternodes but don't have the 1000 DASH, could subscribe to running one with a minimum of 200 DASH or so with the remaining 800 or so required counted from the savings pool of all locked DASH. Instead of getting the full ROI of a full masternode maybe you'd get a bit less based on the reality that there might be an excess amount of DASH (not divisible by 1000) in the pool or not enough people to run masternodes to cover the DASH in the pool. The people willing to host shared masternodes naturally should get a bigger reward than those who just lock their DASH in the savings account. Longer terms should get higher rewards too. On the voting side, anyone who locks their DASH during the entirety of a voting cycle, should be able to vote with their vote weighted based on the percentage out of 1000 DASH they've locked up.
I'm sure there are ways to improve this as I've done almost no brainstorming to come up with this. So, the nightmare you talk about shouldn't be so difficult to code.
A major upside to this set up would I think be decentralization, getting more people involved and invested. You might also get higher voter participation.
Now, what is the downside?