You are identifying a very correct and timely problem, but in my opinion the solution is not the right fit.
The problem is: Nominators are stale. Those are in the active set, as you pointed out, don’t have all the great tools to make good choices. Those that are not in the active set don’t even seem to know about it, and someday they come back with anger.
Some good tools exist out there (eg. Algorithm Integration, but I am sure there are many more) to encourage these nominators to make better choices, but they don’t react.
For example, while almost a year has passed since the launch of nomination-pools, the number of inactive nominators has only decreased from around 25k to 20k. This was much slower that I hoped for. I wish we would have 0 inactive nominators by now.
As another example, if you look at the nomination data, I believe you will find that most nominators are not changing their nominations as frequently as NPoS wished for.
These are social and communication issues, not technical.
We need a solid “nominator forum” where nominators are encouraged to hang out, discuss their choices and status, and ask for each other’s help. We need Wallets and DApps to warn nominators if they are inactive, if one of their validators has signs of getting slashed, or if in general they have not changed their nomination in months.
I have tried to reach out to wallets to implement the above message in the past, but to no avail. Most importantly, polkadot.js/apps still holds a massive market share over stakers, and the main maintainer has resisted any such suggestion in the past. Example in this forum and in PJS-apps.
Another idea, we need a solid awesome-polkadot-nominators that is the one stop shop for nominators to know all the great tools that they possibly have in their disposal.
Another idea, we need a “Polkadot stakers newsletter” that will send a weekly digest of staking news to nominators.
This is why I think “yet another tool” will not solve anything until the greater social problem is solved. This tool needs to reach the hands of the right people, and we should first solve that problem.
Once the above social problems are solved, I expect:
- The number of inactive nominators will drop to a few hundred.
- Existing nominators will be more active.
- More and more nominators will offboard into joining or opening a pool, because the “Minimum DOT Threshold” for active nominators is only ever-increasing.
At this state, we should invest research into more advance nomination strategies, such as the ones suggested here. Although, I would note that the correct future-proof thing to do is to target these into pool-operators, not nominators. As noted above, in a long enough time span, all nominators will be pools, except for perhaps a small number of whales who wish to remain direct nominators.