Congratulations on minting your first block, @lux-witness!
You made me curious about next week's PR events. ;) But I don't want to spoil your surprise.
On the full RPC nodes costs, if I read steemitblog's recent post on scalability correctly, I remember they are attempting to fix the issue by lowering the need to run a full node or to have the full blockchain in memory instead of on fast disks.
This makes sense to me, since the blockchain will only grow in size and keeping up with the growing memory requirements for a full node is not enticing, even if additional rewards would be offered.