Here's another perspective: it's never going to be easy to do anything profitably. That's basic economic theory.... if something were profitable, the resources used to do it would be bid up, or someone will put extra time into doing it better, etc, in such a way that it will never be as easy to plug and play and make a profit on anything.

So in my mind, it being hard for an amateur to make a profit routing lightning nodes is not the problem. The question is whether the barriers to entry are low enough and whether the incentives are properly set up so that the network can remain reasonably decentralized... or even if it's centralized, that if a central player behave badly, it's easy enough to switch to someone else.