That could be intentional. The more complex it is, the harder it is to “prove” the whole thing is nothing more than a twist on classic pyramid schemes and Ponzi schemes. The more complicated it sounds the easier it is to bamboozle people into handing over their hard earned fiat to earlier generations of holders.
You may have misunderstood the eth tech stack. Running your own node is not a means to prevent sandwich attacks.
There are existing solutions for the narrow use case you seem to have - flashbots and a few others. And they have cost savings to you of not running your tx (saving eth gas fees) if your tx submission does not win.
You may want to look a little further, or not.
https://github.com/flashbots/pm
'... mitigating the negative externalities of Maximal Extractable Value ...'
If you think it's to prevent attacks in some absolute sense, that isn't the goal. Your goal is to make life more difficult for them and/or decrease profit incentives.
You only need to remove some of the profit to make it not worth someone's time to maintain, and at least you're bleeding less money if they do continue. You get to be more strategic in how you place orders and make it really annoying for a botter or force the botter to blacklist your trades from your attacks (something that has happened before). You can also identify flaws in the bot and exploit them to make it bleed money(this has been demonstrated as possible many times).
So did BBS message boards.
Better shut this whole, inefficient pile of gack and hacks down!
If you are up for it, you may want to give it another shot. My 3400G now handles this fine, alongside other workloads.
I have not tried myself yet, but it does seem realistic to run a full node on an rpi4b with usb3 storage now, if you don't need to run heavy RPC queries on it.
It seems to be common practice to do the initial sync on a beefier machine with more RAM and IO, and then migrate over to a more lightweight instance for the ongoing.
With Bitcoin I run my node and check the incoming transactions with it whenever I make a big money transfer (for outgoing transactions a full node is not really needed, as I don’t care if the network doesn’t accept it as long as my counterparty does).
Running a Bitcoin node is practical (less than a day of running in the background on the first run) if the amount of money is significant.
But proof-of-work's energy consumption is what kills Bitcoin for me.
For what it's worth, I consider myself crypto agnostic. If a tech delivers something better then great.
I don't necessarily like all of the community, current "leaders" etc — I just know a sticky concept when I see it.
It isn't practical for the majority of people to run their own node. Even Vitalik Buterin acknowledges[1] this isn't realistic for the current state of things.
Last year I was interested in running a sidechain node and I was shocked when I looked at minimum system requirements. I can't just run it in the background and I have a 5600X Ryzen. Plus my NVMe drive needed to be much bigger. It also can eat through SSDs, and HDDs are considered too slow.
Worse to me: It looks like another time consuming hobby. I spent a lot of time even just getting up to speed on the current ecosystem, the jargon, best practices, etc. It often seems like crypto is trying to take something less complicated and make it complicated.
It just seems like people are simply pushing a technology that isn't ready yet for what people in the scene think is currently possible.
My interest for running a node was for prediction market trading to attempt to counter frontrunning aka sandwich attacks. Another ridiculous problem that many people in the scene act like isn't a big deal.
1. https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/05/23/scaling.html