Hey @tfa,
Great work! Don’t know if you are aware, but we’ve been working for some time on a new simulation (hosted at GitHub - maidsafe-archive/datachains_sim). The main difference from the old one is how Joins and Drops are calculated. In the old sim, there is at most one Join and one Drop event per iteration. In the new sim, the number is proportional to the number of sections in the network. This creates much higher pressure on the network (likely higher than the real network will be experiencing) which should in theory uncover potential problems sooner. The flip side is that the new sim is quite a bit slower than the old one.
We are currently looking into the changes you made to see how we can potentially apply them to the new sim. We’ll report back with out results as soon as we have some. Please let us know if you’re interested in updating your version of the simulator to the rules we’re using in the new sim and we’ll try to help with it.