I agree and have thought about this myself. I started packaging fork-observer for Umbrel, but couldn't really test it without an Umbrel node myself. Ideally, that's something someone else could do that a) has an Umbrel / Start9 node setup and b) has the time to do it. 

Have you thought about distributing apps/packages for Start9 and Umbrel? I suspect you could get a bunch of folks running observers if they were config-with-button-click-easy to run.