Speed improvement questions

[walletcollector]

Questions:
Why is the entire block chain needed to start mining? Can we download just the most recent say 3 months worth of blocks before mining? Then download the rest of the block chain at conveinence of network speed? It is not like we can cut a piece of the block chain out and spoof it with something else? If this is possible, can you add a dual authenticating feature to double check the work? Checked against random nodes on the (other side of the) network?
Can you upgrade the database to be more effecient? https://mariadb.com/products/community-server/
Can you distribute the databases to be load balanced among all of the open nodes? Or by region? Internet bandwidth pipes will always be bottlenecked at upload speed unless you pay the premium
Can the block chain be reduced by creating a backup snapshot and putting the snapshot into the current chain to remove the older chain?
Also, Chia plotting can be optimized for HDDs. HDDs are optimized for larger files, not smaller files. More files is less performance because it increases the random reads and writes required. If you need more files, use RAM as the temporary place to store them and then merge them onto the HDD into a single file.
My goal is to build a 16 drive RAID 0 of HDDs for temporary storage or 1 drive per bucket. Which seems to be the minimum plus 9 more buckets? I did the minimum of 16 and saw 25 in my temp folder. Where did the extra 9 buckets come from?