I can encourage you to run a full storj-sim setup yourself or dive into operate and enclosed environment yourself to test such things. You will notice pretty quickly, that many things couple very tightly together.
In terms of your definition as a “game”, i can see why you feel like this, but at the same time i can assure, that we do not want to “play”, rather than go at a quicker pace. If it is more comfortable for you, we would shut down either of the test satellites and go at like 33% development speed. Just seeing it from the negative the entire day, will not help any of us. Flip side of your “game” is that if you are vetted on all satellites, and they keep the same load up, you will earn $$$. 
In terms of network node count i can share without a doubt that we surpassed 42. 
Nerd jokes aside, we have ~8.1k nodes that reported/offered a disk_free space value to my satellite in the last hour.