...If a notary receives roughly 1500 KMD per month, then 80-90% of that for running a complicated masternode without needing any skin in the game is a pretty good deal imo...
Skin can be measured in many ways.
The long and short of what I'm getting out of the last couple of pages is that instead of reinvesting my KMD into buying $35,000 worth of GPUs and hardware to mine KMD, I should have been saving my hard earned KMD and concentrated on buying votes.

It is doubtful any small scale vote buying will have much success and for this year the only vote buying is by buying KMD
That $35,000 USD is considered "small scale" just kinda brings us back full circle to what I said before:
So, in short, the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor.
Of the approximately 6.7 million Komodo created a year, you are complaining about a notary which makes like 15k KMD a year before expenses. That is 0.2% of the coin generation. Even if a notary controlled 4 nodes, it is still less than 1% of coin production in a year. All 64 notary nodes combined are less than 15% of the coin production.
Thats not a monopoly.
I am one of the notaries who pays to have his node maintained. My rationale behind this is, my service provider has much more experience in network adminstration and infosec than i do and has demonstrated that he can keep up with updates, notarizations and respond in an attack scenario, which he did during the coin creation attack early in komodo's history.
The Notary Node funds that have been produced by my node have been used for many different Komodo related things including:
-Coinpayments.net integration
-Having a Komodo Book written for us:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Komodo-Fuel-SuperNET-Concise-History/dp/1981831452-Conference materials
-Advertising
-Giveaways
Additionally, due to my inability to get a sweepstakes website up and running ( legal issues not technical ), I am planning to use the remaining funds of the notary year to establish masternodes in various BarterDEX enabled coins, the proceeds of which will be sold at discount on BarterDEX to encourage use of our DEX to many communities.
I wanted to point this out, as there is there are misconceptions about some of us notaries that aren't tech gurus, that we just leech the funds for solely personal profit.