Do you think it is feasible for the base layer to be accessible to everyone without introducing some potentially catastrophic risk to the protocol?
Yes. IMO most of the risk is in altering miner incentives in a bad way. Those are already fragile/failing so extra care needs to be taken with them.
I am not pro ossification but I am also not pro turning Bitcon into Ethereum
No serious proposal would intentionally do this, but we wouldn't want to do it accidentally either.

To be clear, I'm not arguing for any specific proposal. I don't know enough to be confident in any of them. But, I do think we need bitcoin to be more than an asset for institutions and I do think bitcoin development has serious incentive problems.
Agree with you. On one hand bitcoin performing the function gold did on the gold standard keeping fiat and governments in check seems like a reasonable outcome but on the other hand with bitcoin having solved the portability, verifiability, divisibility issues that keep gold from being more than it is, it would be disappointing if Bitcoin's eventual form is simply digital gold.
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Beyond that, I fear bitcoin can't stay decentralized when custody is centralized, abstracted away, and only institutions have a reason to run nodes.
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That's fair.
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