It’s sad to see Enoki cease development, I was really hyped about the project and its potential.
I agree with everything you said, a little bit less on the cycle issue tho. The role of the NNS and node provider remuneration points are spot on, imo they are some of the less elegant aspect of the ICP as Dfinity seem to have steered away from the concepts of code is law and economic models based on supply/demand in favour of a utopic decentralized government and hardcoded remuneration scheme.
As you said paying providers a flat fee to bootsrap the network is fine, many other chains have chosen a similar approach, the difference here is Dfinity never specified a plan on how eventually the system would transition to a more sustainable and self balancing model, scattered on the forum there are some mentions of it but nothing too detailed. This is worrying cause so much depends on it for both devs and investors, I recently did some math and as it is the system might never become deflationary even without accounting for stakers’ APY:
The issue isn’t easy to solve cause even switching to a scheme based 100% cycle consumed, which would be a huge risk atm due to low profitability for node operators, we’d get rid of inflation generated by node providers rewards, but not the one from the NNS and with all cycles going to NPs there’d be none left for burning. On top of that the scenario you highlighted becomes much more concerning.