Based on an investigation into how many attempts an initial sync node requires before succeeding, 99.677% of initial syncing nodes succeed after 0 or 1 retries. Out of 83,323 initial sync attempts, only 5 initial syncs failed the first three attempts and succeeded on some later attempt (4-9).

As a result, it seems we can safely lower the initial sync attempt threshold. 10 seems to be too large of a number and we can increase observability by failing sooner.