Running a Bitcoin node is not rocket science but competing against industrial scale hashpower is (ie- data centers and elaborate mining fleets)

Industrial scale mining seems to play into the hands of monopolization; A) increasing the barrier of entry for newcomers and B) making it very difficult for them to compete even once they cross that initial barrier

Would not Bitcoin be more 'for the people' if instead of rewarding only those with significant capital that it instead rewarded it's participants without prejudice ?

Of course, the POW engine that drives Bitcoin is a key component of ensuring transactions get processed timely.

That said, I don't think it is a stretch of the imagination to engineer a change or fork if you will that could introduce a new 'lottery' mechanism that has a more equal distribution of new Bitcoin (ie- to anyone who is running a node, even those on a Raspberry Pi for example) while gracefully adjusting/altering/modifies the POW behavior to accommodate.

In fact a proof concept 'lottery balancing' feature aka 'anti-industrial scale mining BIP' could introduce the feature in small increments. Instead of entirely changing the payout of winning a block from sheer hashpower to the lottery system exclusively you could make it so the first version pays out 3% of the newly minted coins to the node lottery winnner and 97% to the hashpower winner.

As Bitcoin matures, we have solutions like Lightning that deal with speeding up transactions and reducing fees; if Lightning continues to improve and perhaps other systems that come alongside it - perhaps the hashpower competition becomes less important anyway as 'transaction speed gets figured out'. If less hashpower is needed to ensure the network runs fast then we can increase the lottery winner percentage the other way say at some point new bitcoins are awarded 97% to lottery winner vs 3% to hashpower winner.

Meanwhile, tx fees continue going to miners. In this light, the theoretical BIP isn't necessarily doing something that will not already be inevitable when the Bitcoin runs out - when miners will need to adjust/adapt to tx-fee-only revenue anyway.

It's not trivial to determine lottery winner in a reliable way; just switching from mining hashpower to 'oh, you run a node' does not necessarily solve the dillemma of highly capitalized participants (since they can just scale horizontally to run thousands of nodes)....

but if we could come up with a way to securely and reliably reward individuals in a balanced manner then perhaps this lottery balancing feature; 'anti-industrialist BIP' could be a viable solution to deter fat cats from getting fatter; sharing the remaining Bitcoin generated to the average man and doing it in a more exciting way.