Happy to answer more questions -- oh, and feel free to open a channel to me. [...] I do require a minimum of 5M sats for any incoming channels.
I am actually thinking about opening a channel to your node. Is there any particular reason why you reject channels smaller than 5 million satoshi? Do you want to avoid frequent rebalancing this way?
There are 4 major reason:
1) It's part of the game to get higher rankings. A lot of the rankings take into consideration average channel size. When I first started out I had the limit at 1M sats and have been slowly increasing. Higher rankings help with #4 below.
2) I've found that smaller channels almost never generate significant transactions -- I suspect this is both b/c smaller nodes open smaller channels and it's harder to keep sats on both sides of a small channel.
3) My rebalance script targets 2M sats on each side; just makes the scripting easy with no small channels.
4) Once you get a rather large node you start having "gravity", meaning people open channels to you randomly. This is great b/c your node grows without having to invest more capital. I found most times people open the smallest possible channel -- so by now using a 5M sat make people who want to connect open a larger channel than they might have otherwise. The other reason is closing channels can be expensive (esp force closed ones), so I don't want small nodes who may shut down in a month to open to me. I want long term node partners.
If BTC crosses 100k, I'll probably drop my min channel size to 4M sats.
I have considered if I should let people connect for less who want to use my node as a connection for their lightning node wallet (as opposed to another routing node) -- maybe one of these days i'll do that.