I had skimmed over your article previously for lack of time. Took the time now to read it carefully and it's frankly scary ...

This was about 500$ for a really simple, optimized smart contract. If I didn't do the optimizations I would have paid double that.

Update: The RAM price halfed in the last month. So it would be around 250$ now - but the high volatility of RAM price makes it hard to plan.

Comparing this to Ethereum, it's a lot what developers have to pay and this might hold new developers back from developing on EOS.
For indie developers making small fun projects to get started, it's just too much.

In old (pre-blockchain) world one might just say: "maybe it's simpler and cheaper to just have a trusted third party ..."

Look at steemmonsters - it's not a "smart contract", everything is run by aggroed and yabapmatt - all people buy and have on the steem blockchain are ... unique id that are associated with steem monsters cards ... in a database owned and controlled by the two guys above ... basically if aggroed decided that he got bored wanted to stop it, all that will remain will be records like this one, that basically mean ...

nothing without the DB behind to translate the "P-NXZ9G8VYG0" into a pack of cards or a card or something ...

And yet people have pumped tens if not hundreds of thousands of bucks into a centralized solution that uses steem to notarize and as an accounting back-end ...

What do you make of this? In my opinion, the bitcoin "trustless" ethos is not widespread ... quite the contrary, it's rather marginal. We are not optimized to trust code. On the contrary, we have been selected for generations on our ability to allocate trust between humans ...