Well the Dash economy still does not reflect that sentiment.  If the market thought it was that easy to run masternodes or even partial masternodes, we would see the market cap skyrocket and masternode ROI would be much lower due to a very large number of nodes as people try to get a piece of the "easy ROI."  It is no different than mining, economically.  It adjusts dynamically.

As an experiment, take all the things you consider to be "effort" and think of them in terms of dollar (Dash) value, and assume the rest of the market treats them as such.  First, take away the electricity costs and masternode hosting costs because those are already assumed to be calculated into the ROI comparison.

On the Dash mining side, the effort of babysitting heat-soaked rigs and hardware management, and keeping up with the tech, etc etc, is currently considered to be LESS difficult than masternode management, due to the fact the ROI is much lower if the same $$$ are invested into rigs versus MN.   In other words, compared to investing purely in MN, miners are willing to risk their money on hardware that has potentially reduced resale value, and perform all of those difficult tasks you mention for free, and still accept less return than putting money into masternodes.

What this tells me, is that a few factors could be at play.  I'll just throw some out, for fun:

1. People are much more comfortable dealing with things in the physical realm, and the learning curve for MN is higher than they are willing to confront, given the current ROI (remember MN started with higher ROI than now, but was also much more difficult to setup back then, but investors took the time to figured it out because they were attracted by the higher profits.

or maybe

2. People see the risk of keeping their money in dash/crypto as higher than keeping their money in depreciating ASICs or difficult-to-resell GPU rigs, so that extra risk is balanced out by the higher Dash ROI. 

Those are just guesses. But the point is that you can think of mining and masternoding as being in economic balance.  Higher risk always gets you higher reward.  The easier or less risky something is perceived to be, the lower the reward.