Not sure where to jump in so I'll do it at the top. I think you raise a lot of good points, I try to direct my zaps to mostly people writing code with a little bit for the best memes (because I think we need to seed our ideas culturally to keep making progress). That said its not a whole lot, its hard for me to justify just randomly zapping around, at every post I read.

I think we need something like, finished consumer products and services being delivered via nostr to actually drive the economy here. I don't think merch does it, I'm not buying a fucking sticker, and you'll have to seriously impress me to buy art because I have limited wall space and its mostly filled with tightly selected stuff (theme, color palette, medium), and I don't think most people even care about stuff. I can't even justify paying for a podcast or someone's take on where we are going, macro, politics etc. because I genuinely think they are all toolbags that think they are the wrench.

I'd pay someone in sats for high quality food like free range eggs and bacon, I'd pay someone in sats to render cleaning or lawn care services, I'd even zap peter McCormick if he'd just post some clips from his football team. I'll say, we need some very creative people to make soverignity and freedom cool, like system of a down and rage against the machine back in the early 2000's cool, I just havent seen it yet.

I think to make up for the shortcomings in the near term, we need to make relay operation cheaper, and I think that looks like scaling solutions, and to sound like a broken record we need to integrate keet.io to take the burden off relays. We need to turn nostr into a handshake and use other protocols to bypass relays after the handshake is made. Lower cost relays -> higher profit margins -> stabilized economy that isn't having the lifeblood sucked out of it by AWS.