Evan, what about this?
I think it would be good to tie the investment requirement to the price - when the coin is more popular, needs more nodes for the security - with the higher price it might limit amount of nodes.
Assuming the difficulty is somewhat related to the price (albeit being skewed a little bit now) - why not make the investment requirement tied to the difficulty level.
This way the node reward should always self regulate and always attract nodes - no matter the coin price.