I think maybe the whole point is that not everybody wants all that shit, or they want to experiment with doing without some of it. That last 5% of reliability

I think maybe the whole point is that not everybody wants all that shit, or they want to experiment with doing without some of it. That last 5% of reliability is on the order of 50% of the cost, or more, isn't it? Is it worth paying double for the small 5% improvement? Not for everyone, obviously. And that's true even assuming just bare costs without markups. Obviously when you take into account how much profit & graft is attached to every single level of that stack, it really starts to add up. Throw in the absolutely, inexcusably bad, awful experience nearly everyone has with the big telecom companies and their employees, and that's enough ill will to propel many an alternative DIY network. Metaphorically speaking, you just told a bicycle owner what a terrible car he has. Or rather, warned him how much the car is going to cost that he doesn't want in the first place. Is it possible the bicyclist can actually tell the difference between a bike and a car? Maybe he even sees some advantage you don't? (As opposed to the implausible but apparently favored hypothesis by car-owners that no, he just likes punishing himself while unsuccessfully pretending the bike is a car. When we don't know a stranger's rationale we glibly tend to assume there is none, and they're just cray-cray.) To make yet another metaphor, when all you know is hammers, the whole world looks like it's full of 1) nails, 2) hammers, and 3) things that suck at being hammers.