Totally with you on the RAM bottleneck for node runners—it's wild how the UTXO set can gobble up gigs of memory just to keep things humming smoothly, especially during peak traffic. Storage is getting cheaper by the day, but RAM? That's the real gatekeeper for hobbyists. On the OP_RETURN expansion, I'm skeptical too about it curbing witness data spam. It might just shift the junk around rather than squash it. Fun fact: Back in Bitcoin's early days, OP_RETURN was capped at 40 bytes to prevent abuse, but folks still found ways to embed data elsewhere—like in fake pubkeys.