Voting Process:
I understand that a witness has to go through the voting process to become a witness in the first place. I understand how blockchain works, the process and operation of submitting transactions to the blocks every 3 seconds like you said, and I understand that is not how Bit Torrent, etc, works, specifically, that they are technically different in how they work.
Hybrid
But why not a hybrid approach? I would suggest having the witnesses as the core of Steem. On top of that, I would try to utilize something like IPFS, like seeding, like whatever Bitchute uses, in decentralizing and distributing the data of the Steem blockchain across the world wide web. My objective is simply in trying to decentralize as much of how Steem works as possible.
Option
At the very least, I would try to make it an option and not a requirement. I guess what I'm getting at is concerning platforms or apps or dapps that are built on Steem and not Steem itself. So, I guess I am mostly talking about how Steemit.com, Busy.org, Partiko, and other Steem apps work. I don't know how the different apps work specifically. But I would, assuming that they are not already, find ways to decentralize how the apps work in distributing data across the web to limit centralization. In doing so, people should be paid in helping in that process via things like Bit Torrent seeding and people should be paid, compensated, in Steem, in money, in cryptocurrencies, etc, or whatever, for helping in sharing the load. So, perhaps, they can't or shouldn't be the witnesses. I understand that.
Mining, Seeding
But I would argue and say that more people could seed or mine or help distribute Steem around the Internet via IPFS, P2P, and/or as many different things as possible. Perhaps what I am talking about does not have to be directly connected to Steem itself and be done indirectly or separate from Steem. I've heard that there are cryptocurrency-like Bit Torrent projects out there that does or will attempt at compensating the seeders via cryptocurrencies. I'm talking about Internet 3.0 which means the attempts at decentralizing the Internet. For example, there is one project called Substratum. And there are others as well.