There will always be a business for people whose time is worth more than the savings and learning from doing the work. The prices on these solutions are very good IMO. I don't buy them because I'd rather do it myself.

Yeah, I understand what you are saying about being expensive. That's a relative question of course as you know. I do not believe most people in bitcoin will ever run a node. I do believe we will see many many more nodes than are being run today but based on people's behaviors in other areas most are too lazy. That's fine by me. I'm not basing my hope on the actions of others. There will always be an elect group of bitcoiners that carry the torch. I'm all for lowing the bar. Companies making it easy, nodes being baked into hardware that does other things. I can see that happening. It will get easier and cheaper. It will get cheaper the faster we get to a bitcoin standard.