I was reading through this reddit discussion and pondered if it would be useful to proactively address the less than ideal situation of minimal network activity by bootstrapping the number of available ring partners.

I.e., now that the blockchain is on the database, we're not really concerned about blockchain size. So, it would theoretically be possible to "prime" the available set ring partners by getting a bot to make 1 average ring-size transaction per minute. Or three transactions: it could be a transaction of 10, 100, and 1000. Obviously the transactions would just be to self, so you'd only be losing transaction fees - donating them to the miners.