I'm with you on the political thing, but the middleman is great for reducing friction. I personally do not like to think about X number of expenses, which means X receipts in the email, X credit card numbers to update, etc. Patreon was one expense. What I would give to have one organization handles every charity I might donate to (and then have them hide my mailing address from them).

At very least it would be nice to have a piece of local software that acts as a "middleman" by integrating with (let's say) Stripe or Bitcoin, and I set up subscriptions that way.