Dealing with a growing UTXO set is not a big technical issue, not even for small-scale node operators. A pruned node with the UTXO set on disk with a memory cache for the most recently-created outputs and we’re set. Bring on the big blocks baby. My Raspberry Pi awaits. Getting a federated Lightning network up-and-running securely is orders of magnitude more difficult than that.

The fact that you make this statement shows you did not grasp any of the point I was making. It most definitely is a big technical issue, its the central scaling issue that everyone ignores. The idea you can just let the UTXO grow and grow ad infinitum and still run a node on a Pi is ridiculous.