I appreciate this post and I think it raises a lot of good points.
I would agree here with EmiT above that I don’t believe that extending the probation period effectively reduces the likelihood of such events. It would also considerably delay and hamper the stake re-distribution mechanism which arises from the prioritization of exits from the top and deposits to the bottom, which I think is a huge benefit of new onboardings.
I also think that given that in both cases of slashing stakers were made whole relatively quickly (and in the Launchnodes case basically suffered no reduced rewards at all since it happened within the rebase cycle), so the point around minimization of financial impact isn’t a burning one, because there essentially wasn’t any. I agree however that slashings also carry a reputational and brand risk which is unique, and that should probably be taken into account when determining things like possible end-state stake (re-)allocation mechanisms. There’s also certainly room to explore improvements in impact mitigation mechanisms, for example: potentially things like (semi-)automated compensation or cover mechanisms, but this will rely on robust cross-layer slashing detection via oracles and then total rewards lost calculations for which there aren’t ideal mechanisms currently, but certainly something to consider in the future, especially as new modules can allow for more complex and explicit “impact recovery” mechanisms).
I do agree that, given the level of scale and responsibility that comes with running this many validators, there can be more work to be done in terms of creating a collaborative and NO-community enforced professional excellence culture as described in this post, that could extend to things like “hypercare” periods following new onboardings.
That said, I do not think it’s the DAO’s (or that of DAO contributors) job to create and “enforce” internal best practices on Node Operators, especially those in the set of curated professionals (especially because it’s not really feasible to do so). That doesn’t mean something like this shouldn’t exist, I believe it should, but it should be a bottom up effort vs top-down and self-enforced by the community. The difficulty around this is finding (a) a good way to do it, (b) the resources to devote to such an effort and the organization of them, and (c) someone to manage this process. I do think the DAO has an opportunity here to at the very least research and fund a workgroup that can try to tackle this, and some contributors have been in discussions with third party consultants to explore the possibility of doing this via LEGO.