I share your experience, although at a much smaller scale. Liquidity management is a pain and potentially expensive. The only way to make it profitable net of opportunity cost is if you are managing a huge amount of liquidity, which of course carries its own risks and is not suitable for small time operators.

That being said, my position is that the option of decentralization can be as important as actual decentralization. Thus, it doesn't bother me as much that routing is dominated by big players, if we still have the option to easily connect to peers that we need to do business with. I wrote about the importance of option value here: #1030571