To bring it back to the OP's "Why would we want the more powerful hardware that is online all day to be dumb?", I don't think relays should be smart, I think they should be efficient. As you pointed out they need to protect themselves from things like spam to keep costs down and stay alive. As someone else pointed out, we can have things run in the datacenter as other clients / DVMs, and still have simple, efficient relays. So at the protocol level, my expectation is that the more we burden the relays the less reliable and more expensive they'll become. OTOH we can have simple web clients, fancy web clients, slick mobile clients, and colossal workstation clients, and the cost and reliability is paid for by the person running it. We should try and figure out how to compensate relay runners not so they'll add more features, but just so they'll keep doing what they're doing. It's hard enough already and they aren't getting as much out as they're putting in.

And of course: we're all going to do whatever we think is best, because that's what makes nostr awesome! Apparently all we needed to do was remember that we can change the world. How long have we been sleeping 😞? Well we aren't anymore ☀️ 😎 ☀️