Your analysis about profitability and recommendation is based on very wrong costs assumptions, and many already asked you to stop discussing profitability as a reason to eliminate validators given your incorrect assumptions for the analysis:
Not only your assumptions are very incorrect, but you also overlooked the fact that you would actually make latency much worse if the bottom validators are mostly based in Japan while the top ones no.
You are also overlooking the Optimistic Execution in CometBFT v0.38 with ABCI++ that will be introduced in a few days in the next dYdX upgrade and that it will already improve latency by a lot:
To summarize:
Nethermind suggestion: Based on very incorrect costs assumptions with no supporting research/data/surveys we suggest to remove the bottom 30 validators for profitability concerns
Community suggestion:
-Nethermind costs assumptions are very incorrect, hence profitability cannot be used as an argument to remove the bottom 30 validators
-Nethermind missed the main point and advantage to reduce validators which is latency improvement
-Nethermind missed that in the next upgrade latency will already improve by a lot thanks to Optimistic Execution
-Nethermind missed that for latency, validators being based in Japan is the most important metric and that to maximize latency improvement we would need to remove the validators not based in Japan
-If Nethermind was suggesting to remove validators not based in Japan to improve latency this could make sense, but this was suggested by community members, not Nethermind in their report. However, Nethermind still insists in removing the bottom 30 validators which not only makes no sense given their incorrect costs assumptions to reach that conclusion, but this would actually damage latency since validators based outside Japan is not equal to the bottom 30 validators