Vitalik: Changes to the protocol and staking pools could improve decentralization and reduce consensus overhead

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin wrote an article discussing "changes to the protocol and staking pools that could increase decentralization and reduce consensus overhead."
The article points out that there are currently two types of Ethereum staking: node operators and principals. Vitalik believes that both have flaws: the centralization risk of node operators and unnecessary consensus layer burdens.
Vitalik believes that decentralization can be improved by expanding the rights of delegates to choose. Delegates can choose which node operators to delegate their stake to. Node operators will have a "weight" in the consensus that is proportional to the total stake delegated to them; delegators can choose to play a role in the consensus that will be "lighter" than full staking and will not be subject to long withdrawals and large risks, but will still serve as a check on node operators.
Additionally, there is value in splitting staking into a higher complexity slashable tier that functions every slot but may only have 10,000 participants, while lower complexity tiers are only occasionally called in to participate. Lower complexity tiers could be exempt from slashing entirely, or could randomly offer their participants the opportunity to temporarily (i.e. a few slots) deposit and be slashed.
In practice, this can be achieved by increasing the validator balance cap, and then implementing a balance threshold (e.g. 2048 ETH) to determine which existing validators enter higher or lower complexity tiers.