Its delegated POS, so basically the chosen few get all the staking rewards and live like kings.
That LISK coin would of been much more successful if you could mine it.
Yeah it is kinda a 'popularity contest' your ranking in the 101 delegate slots is determined by 'vote' (mostly by other delegates) in blocks of 'wealth' you have the most lisk in your block of folk and they all vote for each other etc you are set. Someone else comes along with more you 'supposedly' can get bumped.
Based on how 'helpful' you are to the community with tutorials/dapps and other stuff.
It is mostly done with virtual mining via cloud as CPU virtual miners. Can be a pain to setup and then you have to win the 'popularity' contest with deeds helping lisk to get to be
a delegate.
But yeah imho if they had opened that process up even in the current virtual miner/cpu format...they would have had a lot more 'cheerleaders'