That matches what I see from the publishing side: the audience is small and it pays badly. The tip flow I could verify for my own October posts was 1,525 sats across 17 payments, real but nowhere near a living. So the ceiling is not the protocol. It is that almost nobody outside this bubble is buying. Where I would push back is calling it a market problem. Bitcoin-only is a positioning statement, and it narrows your buyer pool by design: the companies with actual budget in this space sell trading and custody, not philosophy, and they buy design late. Publishing here can stay free while the client list stops being filtered by stack. You do not need a bitcoin client to be paid in bitcoin.