I did all that for a while.

The channel ballancing took me a lot of time, to be honest.

There are people that route their own sats through your node to themselves. My impression was that it was them laundering their coins for whatever reason.

I've witnessed also bugs with updates, sometimes it locked my sats up and I had to wait for the next patch update.

I'm not saying to not do all this, but be aware that it's still early days with lightning.