@anyx: You disagree

You disagree that it's ideological, then you give an point that ignores my last comment entirely, then another point that is subjective and not quantifiable. It sounds to me like you have ideology at heart here.

I'll repeat my point in response to #1 -- I believe many more public nodes are good. I think others, especially businesses (whom have the skills) should follow along and build more infrastructure. I don't know how you've missed the fact that we align here.

For #2, sure, many developers aren't perfectly efficient because they are not immediately forced to optimize.
Yet you don't run a public node so I don't know how you can really comment on this being a problem; it's a subjective view and I have not seen any quantitative data to back up this being a problem. From my perspective, I haven't seen this as a problem on my nodes at all.

Lighter consensus models would be great, if you actually read my post I linked to, I talk about this -- but it requires 2/3rds of witnesses to provide APIs and signatures in order to be byzantine fault tolerant.

Finally, public good... in terms of actual economics, you are straight up wrong.

What is Rivalry? Can someone "use up" an API? No, it doesn't disappear after you use it. It's not like you can chop down all the trees so you can burn firewood and then I can't. I can use the API, you can use the API, anyone can use the API. All at the same time. It's just data, and data is replicable.

What is Excludability? Can you use it if I am using it -- absolutely, yes. Its parallelizable and effectively functions with renewable capacity. Can someone stop you from using it? Most probably not. Many public goods are like this, like roads or clean air. I can pollute the air or congest the roads, and make it shit for others, that doesn't make it no longer a public good, it just degrades the quality.
Could it be excludable? Yes -- if a node were to perhaps ban certain users from using it. But this would be visible (and I don't do this). Notably though, someone else can't stop you from using it -- only I (the provider) could do so. Roads are like this too -- a government may prevent passage for various reasons.

Wishing something wasn't a public good does not make it so. It absolutely does qualify. It qualifies in the exact same way that the blockchain itself also qualifies -- service can be degraded by bad actors, but it does not prevent the fundamental properties of being non-rivalrous and non-excludable. If I were to tell you "A blockchain is not a public good", consider how you would argue against that. Do you see how the same logic applies to the data access as it does to the data entry?

p.s., you're fine to criticize and oppose. I just wish you understood the larger picture here.

We will mostly just have to agree to disagree about what is best.

However, on this point I must clarify:

Finally, public good... in terms of actual economics, you are straight up wrong

No I'm not.

Go look at what I wrote (I just went back and double checked). I did not say that "the API" is not a public good, I said that "API service" is not a public good.

The API (specification) itself is a public good of course. Anyone is free to use "the API", it can not be "used up", etc.

But a server providing API service (which incorporates bandwidth, processing, and storage) is absolutely not a public good. It is rivalrous in that people must compete to use its finite resources. It can absolutely be "used up", as you put it, in the sense that too much usage will degrade the quality of service to unacceptable levels. It is excludable in that access can be easily restricted (using, for example, API keys).

I'd suggest reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#Examples for a good discussion as to what is or is not a public good in economic terms. The best examples are intangibles which share more with the abstract concept of "an API" and less with physical API servers:

defence, public fireworks, lighthouses, clean air and other environmental goods, and information goods, such as official statistics, open-source software, authorship, and invention

If I were to tell you "A blockchain is not a public good",

I was mistaken. I was thinking of read access to a blockchain, which is a public good in the same sense as many of the above information goods. Write access to a blockchain is not a public good. Indeed any blockchain which tried to be such would be spam attacked (as Steem was being when it didn't implement sufficient measures of exclusion pre-RC) and fail.

The wiki page you link to suggests "... quasi-public goods because excludability is possible", which in my opinion fits the bill for both read and write access to blockchains. They can, in the same was as roads, be blocked to poor overall usage.

But you are absolutely wrong about rivalrousness. A server providing readable data is infinitely renewable. It cannot be used up because the information is not deleted after being provided. You are confusing this property with excludability. It is a question of quality of service (which falls under the excludability property).

In this case, I would correct my definition to suggest that public APIs and public Blockchains, like roads and public libraries, are both quasi-public goods. Could we agree on that?