all 3 of these things simply cannot be true at the same time

It’s a fair criticism. You need to apply to be a standard validator, and then everyone there gets put into a queue and batched out with around 25 brought in weekly. The set has grown an additional 500+ since Q3 last year for a total of 859 validators today. Assuming after liveness rewards drop on April 30th, it will be fully permissionless on that front. Super Validators are permissioned and voted in by the constituency though. But it’s not pure legacy TradFi, there’s a wide range of players as SVs, even startups like @zenithfdn or Web3 entities like @chainlink, @LayerZero_Core, @BitGo, @circle, etc.