I made a tutorial for them and they gifted it to me

https://expatriotic.me/ashigaru

I lived in China, so running infrastructure was prohibitive due to networking challenges. So yes I used other "trusted" nodes by people I knew for Sparrow, Monero and Ashigaru...

Tangent, but look at LN. It is inherently a system where you build trust and have to trust people. You don't open channels to untrusted or unreliable people...

E.g., I "trusted" your Olympus node and kept it full for spending, yet you still closed my channel to you... Now I use WoS to collect tips rather than fussing with the trust model of LN...

And let's be fair, spending with monero is way better than managing Lightning... Hence why only custodial LN has the UX needed to get adoption. And the capacity of LN is laughable small.