I agree with your point on our current crop of miners, very sad that people with so much skin in the game don't take the time to learn more about Bitcoin.

So while maybe human node runners might be better than the current situation it would also be terrible.

Here's why: in a centralized world bad ceos get outcompeted by good ceos so we end up with the higher end of the bell curve in charge. This is pretty good and mostly works. If the decentralized world is doomed to follow the middle of the brll curve (because everyonr gets a vote) we'll lose. We need a decentralized way to weigh the capable members of the decentralized community higher than the average member.