We have seen what happens with knee jerk reactions. I myself am waiting to see if any changes are going to be made on the witness selection front, primarily the removal of non-active accounts votes counting for a witness vote. So I fully believe that at minimum all witness votes need to be redone every 6 months, that the account holders need to re-affirm their choice/selection of witness. If they fail to renew at the six month period then they must wait 60 days before they are allowed to vote for witnesses again. The six month period would start from the day the witness selection is made, so no excuses I was on vacation, if a person expects to be gone for a little bit and want their witness vote to count all they have to do is re-vote their choice before going on hiatus or being gone for a bit.
Right now we are just finishing week one up on the new chain, I will let my proxy continue for a bit, but I do hope to see some talk in a month at least of ideas on re-vamping the witness selection process.
If you use peakd make a list and add all the witnesses that you run across posting and who's post you read, then when the talk gets going you have a very handy feed to see what they have been doing. (I like the List Function on peakd)
If we ever get to the point where dissenting opinions of regular stakeholders are not penalized, I would be in favor of an idea similar to yours where witness votes expire after an allotted amount of time. Unfortunately, the very first thing someone would do is make a dApp for that, making the plan not entirely foolproof. Perhaps the blockchain would need to incorporate some kind of image dealio that will test if you are human before a voting session expiration. Thanks for sharing your ideas @badshadow!