Aave is definitely a great place to start earning from lending, it's not really that much of a big profit maker, but it's safe at least and the amount of money you could make from that changes based on how much risk you are willing to take as well. I believe the best way to move forward would be just focusing on how to make money based on what you can do with your money, and for that reason I believe we could use Aave to get a greater return since that's at least a place that will not steal your money.

FTX was terrible because you literally gave the right of your money to someone else, which in return they just bankrupted and that wasn't really a good thing, we can't give our money to someone else, we need to end up keeping it all to ourselves, and DEX lending does allow that, it's only between two people with collateral so you are doing fine at worst case.