Staking nodes are getting disproportionally more rewards than mining nodes weighted by the cost of running. To run staking node you can use cheap hosting and end paying $40 a month, they do not play any role in consensus, so if something goes wrong, blockchain will continue to operate normally. There is no slashing of stake as well, staker can only lose future rewards, which is not big deal for many of them. In my experience, stakers do not check performance of the nodes often.
On the other side, mining nodes actually run the consensus. Cost of running such node is significantly higher as well as operation requirements. Node operators need to run many nodes so they end up with a cluster, otherwise it does not make any financial sense. 99% of consensus nodes are deployed to AWS in Oregon, AWS is very expensive comparing to regular hosting offers. Miners can’t leave AWS because it will significantly decrease they rewards.
When there is an outage of mining nodes, it can easily lead to stuck of the blockchain which happens several times a year. Remember a network recovery around a month ago?
Mining rewards are security and operation budget of the network, This is very important to keep Zilliqa secure and online.
Staking system does not bring any value to the blockchain and the community. 40% of inflation just goes to rich ZIL holders which make them reacher in exchange of 2 weeks unstaking period and RPC API endpoint which usually no one uses.
Think of this, Zilliqa paid around $15m last 365 days to stakers(ZIL = $0.017). Cost of running staking(RPC API) nodes are around $30,000 a year, everything else goes to token stakers, while stakers are usually the richest token holders. Just imagine what kind of protocols we would have on chain if Foundation will be able to spend a fraction of this money to fund teams?