aschmahmann I think the goal of the Hydra Boosters is to increase the ratio of effective to ineffective nodes in the DHT. This idea came at a time when ineffective nodes were a huge problem and caused the majority of the delay when using the DHT, since then (in 0.5.0) IPFS added more effective NAT traversal and active removal of undialable nodes from the DHT. This went a long way to *reduce* the number of ineffective nodes, which is what we should be trying to do.
The sad fact when it comes to p2p networks like this is that all nodes are not created equal, some are high/low bandwidth, high/low speed or high/low availability. IPFS has no built-in way for high resource nodes to volunteer more in the network, which is understandably a goal of some server operators who see bad nodes as a bottleneck.

I called Hydras "interesting" because I do not think they are the ideal solution to this problem, but I do recognize them as at least a solid attempt.