If I could, I'd put it up for a vote, before V8 went live, whether to leave it to activate, or to alter it asap so it activates but does so in a way that doesn't hinder new-solo and older/smaller solo miners.

The v8 changes were required due to critical network security risks associated with providing magnitude a stake weight. Once v8 is implemented and stable we can certainly prioritize the topic of POR payout prioritization on github/steemit/etc.

You should check out the github wiki's proposed incompatible changes, there are many proposed improvements which will directly benefit POR users.

The entire mechanism of Gridcoin was supposed to be to encourage research, I feel V8 moves us farther away from that and it should be altered before being allowed to activate.

Given the network security risk of sticking with the current staking mechanism (which includes mag in the staking mechanism), maintaining the network/blockchain on pre-mandatory versions (forked blockchain) will likely experience malicious network consensus interference.

Once the mandatory has passed, we can transparently discuss improvements for the POR mechanisms as a community & assign an appropriate priority (and bounty via dev program) for development (considering the other high priority development items in the pipeline).