I got your point, but waiting endless hours for first confirmation (and LOT of services requires at least one confirmation) is imho not comfortable at all and should be somehow changed..
Yes, but all you can do today is ask services to trust your unconfirmed transaction like they do with credit cards.
If you defraud them, they can just terminate your service.
If people abuse this in retail, they may end up having to ask for photo id for Bitcoin purchases.
Given a year or so, hopefully Lightning will solve it in a nicer way.
The measurement of full nodes changed.
The measurement by multiple different people happened to all change in just the exact same way so that the same conclusions were drawn? Don't be ridiculous.
Furthermore, it is complete bollocks, that you would need a datacenter to have a full node.
20 MB blocks means you need 41 Mbps
upload. Most people don't have that even available.