Agree that at some point, the big projects should run their own nodes. Once they're successful and making profits, they should be able to afford nodes. Steemit's RPC has been good to the community, but at high cost to Steemit Inc. Those servers are more expensive than people realize.

Technology has evolved exponentially in the last two years! Plus, with MIRA, it's more affordable to run a node, albeit with a slower replay time. However, downtimes are part of the internet experience, it's something we already live with. Hopefully in the future Steemit will figure out a way to reduce long replay times, some ideas are in the air, so it's a matter of time before they get implemented.