Node has finally announced their "new mechanism for a secured an equitable forging process". It's called Proof of Activity (PoA) and is a combination of node up-time and purchase activity. Sound familiar? That's because it is. We designed it and released a whitepaper about it 4 months ago.
I think you are probably correct here. I have been following the Node thread and they have even admitted that they haven't been able to implemented PoA yet...for now, they are just using random assignments to forgers. So clearly, it's not something that they have tried and tested; they are probably still trying to figure out how Crypti is doing it ;-)