Glad to see your desire to improve the quality of the witness role.
These are not new topics, but it seems to be very difficult to get traction. I believe it's gonna require coming up with a BSIP and then getting community to recognize it.
There don't seem to be many witnesses willing to discuss such details, let alone take the initiative to write a BSIP to formalize the conventions. I also don't recall if there is a formal approval process BSIPs must go through by committee or whoever. I think they're more a matter of formalizing proposals in a document. BSIPs are good standards to have.
Some reform / evolution of the witness role will require coding, for example to implement standards that can be measured and automatically removing or disabling witnesses when those standards are violated, such as when X number of blocks are missed, or fails to publish feeds at a minimum frequency, or the feed accuracy slips outside an certain deviation from other witness feeds.
We have discussed a worker proposal to get professional feed sources, but they are quite expensive from what I gather. There is also the issue of centralization. That's one reason why no single feed script should be relied upon. To my knowledge there are 3 primary scripts most witnesses use, however the parameters each witness uses for them can be different based on that witness' influence. There are few standards on setting those parameters.
There is a Telegram bot created by witness spartaco to notify of missed blocks, set time slots for when during the hour a witness should publish their feed (use /slots in Telegram to list which minute is assigned to what witness. There are 3 groups that bot works in: BitsharesDEX, Bitshares_Witnesses and BTS Witness Alerts). Here are the commands the bot responds to:
/help
/price [ASSET]
/missed WITNESS
/monitor WITNESS
/listmonitor WITNESS
/stopmonitor WITNESS
/status
/feed [ASSET]
/slots
/setslot WITNESS MIN
/rmslot WITNESS
/locations
/setlocation WITNESS LOCATION
/rmlocation WITNESS
Please use the BTS Witness Alerts channel for urgent matters only. It's kindof like the "Hotline" to all witnesses. Witness alt recently posted in the forum saying several witnesses were broadcasting double blocks back to back. If true that would be a major issue and could cause forking of the blockchain. It turned out to be a false claim however the best place to communicate such things is via this real-time Telegram channel.
I would like to hear more about your offer to buy a subscription to a professional price feed source. Your offer is generous but I don't think we should continue to rely on altruism to support necessary blockchain operations to publish accurate price feeds.
Price feeds and block production require 2 different skill sets and I suggested these should be separate roles. The general attitude I see expressed however is that "producing a price feed isn't very complicated" and thus need not be split out. I have a different perspective which I've expressed in more detail elsewhere but it seems I'm alone in it. There does seem to be some agreement on the idea of automating some type of witness monitoring, but when it comes to saying what corrective action to take mostly I hear crickets.
It's also important to note these issues are of interest primarily to witnesses, and many of them are not interested in them enough to contribute to the discussion.