It's definitely not a very lucrative business to run a hive-engine witness. We just manage to get into top 20 when some witnesses are having difficulties. If this happens for a couple of days, we manage to cover our costs. Otherwise we rather lose than win anything. The problem with the present situation is that people who are not in top 20, don't have an incentive to keep their witness running. This means that when top witnesses have troubles, there is hardly any backup available. Also it's pretty difficult to get more votes. There are very few WB holders and there is hardly any liquidity in the market. It would be worth thinking about taking BEE tokens as governance tokens since they are spread in a much more decentralised way... Thanks for writing this post and shading some light to the problem.