I knew I would get a comment like this.
Do we really think there are ten of thousands of nodes not accepting connecting being spun up in secret? Or can we go with the simpler explanation of not many people are bothering to spin up a node and we shouldn't be making it harder to do so because at some point it may or may not be a problem.
Well, yes. If the service only records nodes that it can establish a connection to, then it wouldn't reflect those which aren't allowing it. There really isn't a reliable way to get every single node in the world.
There really isn't anyone trying to make the synchronization any harder than it is. Loads of optimizations have been made but older computers will still suffer due to their hardware. IBD will be the longest process for most so it really isn't that big of a concern as you're only doing it once.
Samsung SN550, if a QLC drive causes it to take 4 weeks to sync something is really broken with the network. But like I said when I manually added a bunch of nodes that had either TELUS or Google Fiber as their ISPs my sync time dropped to 40 hours. Slowly as they disconnect and I go back to the 8-9 nodes my sync time goes back to 3 weeks.
Definitely shouldn't take 4 weeks, especially with NVMe if you're talking about WD SN550. My synchronization took a day with my HDD and 6 hours on my SATA SSD but they had 6GB of dbcache. Is your ISP throttling your connection by any chance?