I'd like to add to this. There is definitely a barrier of entry
with regards to setting up a full node. Unless you're living in a
first world country, the bandwidth requirements alone, will
outright prevent you from even setting up a full node (sync since
genesis).
To maintain that also becomes a sunk cost, as there is no
financial incentive to run a node, only an idealogical one. Most
of the people who benefit and will benefit from Bitcoin, are the
un-banked. Which you will find in 3rd world countries, that don't
have ISPs that provide the data packages, to cater for the
requirements of running a full node. I'm sure many would like to,
but simply cannot afford it.
A user may not want to run a node at home, but rather on a
digital ocean or AWS server, which they cannot afford to do either
considering the bandwidth and storage costs associated with it.
However, I don't think they should be excluded from participating
in the network (supporting proposals, voicing their opinions,
running their own wallets, writing their own applications on top
of Bitcoin [which I think is extremely important]).
So I would definitely be in favour of a small node of sorts. It will present us with some interesting technical challenges
along the way but it's definitely worth while looking into.
Financially incentivising nodes is a really weird area because it
would allow someone to essentially automate the deployment of
nodes. i.e. if a node can pay for itself 100% (even at a lesser
value, it just becomes cheaper overall), you could write an
application that uses an AWS API or a digital ocean API to
automatically deploy 100's of nodes. Which sounds great but not if
that person is malicious and wants to prevent the community
adopting proposals.