> our modified protocol is not guaranteed to make progress whenever a majority of nodes is active
That seems like horrible tradeoff
That seems like horrible tradeoff
The sentence you quote is inevitably going to be true for any type of Raft quorum that can reach consensus with a minority of nodes. You don't even need to get into the specifics of the math.
Suppose you have a quorum Q. Then its complement Q' must not also be able to form a quorum; if it did, a network partition between Q and Q' would create a split-brain. So if Q is a minority subset, then Q' is a majority that cannot reach consensus on its own.