I think currently the growth and connectivity of lightning network is skewed to the side of early adopters joining, many of them trying to become profitable routing nodes and overall just experimenting with the space.

Fee structures will change when we get more organic growth with real world economies moving to lightning - think towns, communities, cities as that will naturally become more localized in terms of connectivity and network graph.

For example: if you have a bar and majority of people pay with lightning and you can pay your suppliers with lightning then it will make sense to be connected to either a local liquidity provider that primarily servers that community or directly to your counter party in that transaction

Lots of nodes currently try to gamify node status and be better positioned in the network as they don't have a "natural" economic position yet, but I think with more businesses coming on lightning and wider adoption among people this will change in the future.

I suspect we'll see long term network growth more in the direction of how internet works with isp, local internet exchanges routing metropolitan or country traffic and only sending the traffic further out if the destination is not local. In this scenario bigger routing nodes will become more of a backbone like we have tier 1 internet providers who take care of underlying connectivity between smaller participants (be it isps/cities/countries or in lightning network case clusters of nodes representing connected economies)