I too have been skeptical of PoS, but IMO the thinking behind it has gotten better and better and there are pretty large chains that have been running without c

I too have been skeptical of PoS, but IMO the thinking behind it has gotten better and better and there are pretty large chains that have been running without compromise. Thankfully with ETH 2.0 the cost of publishing data on the chain will drop dramatically (there will be ~63x increase in throughput of publishing data, not transactions) so contract creation should be cheaper. But really if you are interested in the space it might make sense to just publish on an L2 like polygon.