For Techs and cleanenergy, to stock up their plate:

Referring to other discussions, maybe a slight twist, saving crunch time rather than increasing. If it's okay for a shorter/cut off task to form a valid quorum with a task that get's to run all 16 jobs successfully, without RCx=...etc, would it make sense to send a signal to a ''late'' client to cut the calculation short to just the minimum? In example:

Copy _0 is returned by a fast/reliable client in 12 hours, takes 8 hours to compute.
Copy _1 is not yet reported at that point in time.

When copy _0 has received confirmed the Ready to Report clearance, the server readies a signal to the _1 to compute minimum only. If _1 was already started, ignore, else if happened to have connected to server, follow request to compute short.

The logic would only work for all 16 jobs completed in a task. Of course there are buts such as ''what if the completed task fails on first validation attempt?". Maybe these fast returned tasks could pass through some kind of pre-validation, if that were possible.

Thinking out loud ;))

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PS: Of course, if the idea was already proposed [gray cells failing, think we had an intentional slow/fast quorum pairing before], all credit to her/him for coming up with same, before me ;O)