No, what I am really saying is that PoW mining and PoS staking aren't so dramatically different in complexity like you are saying. They are actually both complicated businesses with variable yields. The only difference is that with PoW, the benchmark is electricity cost, whereas with PoS the benchmark is the other investments which you could have invested your staking money into.
When’s the last time a billion dollar staking operation had to build multiple mining datacenters and fill them with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of hardware? That’s just not required for staking. It just isn’t. They’re not equivalent operations. Not in any way. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
Which of these two scenarios seems to favour the rich, in your mind?
I would say it’s harder to compete with miners than stakers.
There’s really no comparison. Running a business with high fixed and variable costs, and considerable competition is far more difficult to pull off successfully than a passive investment. Which one do you think favours a “gilded elite” more?
Putting money in a bank isn't even enough to keep up with inflation at the moment, the same is true for Proof of Stake coins, too.
If you reason like that, I suppose in your world fireworks is the same thing as a rocket bringing us to Mars?
Is running Amazon and making a profit the same thing as just milking interest from a bank account?
These differences aren't trivial, they are massive. In a PoW world, most rich people don't mine, they just hold the crypto. In a PoS world, said rich people auto-mine by just holding crypto.