I wouldn't say you're in any more of the hands of regulators as a node operator than you are as a miner at a technical level. There's little that any government could do to track down who operates what lightning node. Lots of LN nodes are operated behind TOR by default so even tougher for an enforcement standpoint.
As for a regulation standpoint I can see the argument though I think other legal measures will trump the MSB issue. Lightning is far more than only value transfer as it powers decentralized chat applications like WhatSat. This should give the first amendment lawyers lots of room to argue enforcement is abridging the freedom of speech of those operators even beyond making the argument that money is actually speech. I would hope so anyway for freedom's sake.
I think you summed it up perfectly with a lot of different possibilities before us. I'm hoping that whatever network we use it ends up making the world a better place than the world we live in now.
Fortunately, with the present system, that is a very low bar.
With the way things are going, the power grab is only going to make things worse.
We need to see a lot more decentralized to provide people with options.
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