I think countryside living would be attractive to a lot of people (it would to me) if I could get a "limited maintenance" setup. Either something that takes <30min / day to do myself or something that I can outsource relatively cheaply.

I wonder if technology could help. Current setup for most houses in the country needs a hacker: someone who is comfortable tinkering with everything from plumbing to roofing (or at least can competently assess those). Could a low maintenance setup be bought / developed, even if its sticker price is higher? Basically, instead of an old custom truck I am looking for a Toyota Corolla: expected trouble-free operation for a long time with basic maintenance. If the answer is yes there may be a significant number of buyers.

We needed to replace our washing machine when we bought the house, so I did the research and got the best front-loader we could afford. Turns out, due to $reasons, it vibrates throughout the whole house (it's on the second floor) and although it's working fine, every time we do the laundry we shudder at the annoyance. Now, we eventually will have to settle for a lower-performing top loader but I'm still not 100% certain that it won't cause the same problem, so we feel stuck. Keep the good, but frustrating, washer, or take a risk that another almost thousand dollar washer will have the same problem. Outsourcing these decisions and annoyances to a landlord is appealing.

Fighting entropy is a great way to put it - we had things come up that resulted in our inability to tend to the garden, and in a month, it's overwhelmed with weeds. That's my weekend project. Could we pay someone to clear it? Sorta. Service providers don't like (for obvious reasons) small projects, so nobody will return our calls when we say "It's like 2-3 hours of weeding". Could we find someone (say, a college student or something?) to do it? Probably, but it'd be almost more work to find and vet someone to do the work than it is to just do it ourselves. And, there goes a weekend. A weekend that, if we were still in the City, would be spent doing anything else.

I wouldn't trade it for almost anything, but it's not clearly the best solution for everyone. I would totally pay the equivalent of a "condo fee" for someone to manage all this nonsense.

This is why washing machines are usually on the ground floor in UK homes - usually in the kitchen, where they're close to the plumbing, despite there being very little overlap between food preparation and washing clothes.

Not really. A lot is a function of age, upkeep, how idiosyncratic the house is, the amount of property, etc.

I live in about a 200 year old farmhouse on a few acres with neighbors with more acreage (the best kind :-)). I'm not sure I'd describe it as a full-time job at this point but it has been at various points--the house had very little money put into it for a long time.

You can outsource some things. I have a lawn service for the area around my house that I keep as lawn. My neighbor plows our shared driveway and runs his tractor over my field once a yer or so. But, there's no magic number you can call to just "Make it so" even if you're more than willing to open up a checkbook. Took me about a year to finally get a badly needed bathroom remodel done.

And trees die and need to be dealt with. Painting needs to be done now and then. Finally having some long overdue to be replaced windows done. Had to seal the deck this spring. Etc. Etc. It's hard to avoid spending a fair bit of time if you own a house.

But there is an answer commonly used by people who holiday in the country for only part of the year, and therefore aren't around to do their own maintenance: the shared cabin / "static caravan" / "trailer".

Yes, in the current model. But the same is often true for most things (cars, computers, etc.). I wonder though if a different setup is possible, the one that optimizes for low maintenance and modular diagnostics and replacement. If so what a price tag would be. If it is well into 6 digits what scale would be needed to drive down the price extra to 100k or less?

Maybe that is not feasible, but I think we are at the state where if this were possible enough folks would jump at it.

A big problem is that it's hard to outsource things that aren't repeatable regular tasks like lawn mowing and housecleaning. Of course you can outsource anything. But before you know it, you're spending a lot of money somewhere like the US for a reliable property manager and, as my neighbor was reminding me just yesterday, managing people then brings its own set of issues.

Of course back then a half day of unplanned downtime warranted a phone call to your big customers but wasn’t really a dealbreaker.

Most maintenance time is spent outside because we have a couple of acres, an orchard and we enjoy gardening. But there was nothing stopping us from getting a house without acreage in the same area.

One thing that has improved, maintenance-wise, is snow removal. In our suburban home I used to spend 40-60 minutes removing snow from the driveway. Now we have a bigger driveway, but it's very affordable to get a professional snow removal guy to come with a plower and take care of it in 5 minutes. I started to enjoy winters much more after moving. Plus the white winter scenery here is much better than the muddy winter in the suburbs.