Thanks for this announcement @SvenF, and for the clear explanation.
This sounds good, avoiding the need for downtime of important services when there’s a need to reshare keys between subnets (e.g. Generation of Schnorr production keys and II subnet downtime - Developers - Internet Computer Developer Forum (dfinity.org)).
Are there any plans for what other responsibilities these new subnets may have (presumably the backup subnet won’t house any other critical services)?
What sort of capacity utilisation does this account for? i.e. It’s possible to meet decentralisation targets under ideal circumstances, but presumably there will continue to be a need for a level of redundancy (which allow decentralisation targets to be met even when a certain percentage of allocated nodes go down or become degraded). Or is the idea that nodes can just be reclaimed from the larger subnets if needed (for use by a struggling subnet), rather than sitting idle in the meantime as they often are now?