""So ripple "recommends" and someone "chooses" the validators....interesting. Who chooses? Who controls the criteria? How long before expediency or outright corruption interferes with this process?""

Right, it's much better to just trust whoever pays the most money to choose which transactions go in like Bitcoin does. Bitcoin's mining scheme inherently centralizes because it heavily favors whoever has the lowest cost of power and mining ASICs. That's going to be someone. Ripple's consensus scheme has no inherent preference for centralization versus decentralization.

If Ripple wound up with three companies in China choosing how many transactions go in and which ones they are, the stakeholders of the network could change that. Two months ago, Ripple was pretty much the only stakeholder. But that's changing now.