2) I am frustrated at the lengths we individual miners must go to in order to compete with CORPORATIONS that only have to expend the effort it takes to wiggle their pinky finger and drop 100 million dollars on mining equipment and the datacenters in which to run them. In a few short months, we find ourselves competing against tens of PETAHASHES on the network, generated in large part by these corporations. THAT is my primary frustration. Anything created for the good of all, which I believe Bitcoin was, can be and has been perverted by the rich and powerful.
I will note that these huge corporations are also the ones who enabled you to be mining at 1.2TH.
Of course, if you are the typical mining rig buyer, then you probably got screwed by those corporations, in that your investment will probably never pay off in BTC; but that depends on the details of your rig, how much you paid, and when you started mining.
I will also note that many of these companies were not started or funded by "the rich and powerful". A lot of them were just nerdy guys, hardware engineers, who got into Bitcoin back when CPU mining was possible, then GPU mining, then they pooled their resources and built some ASICs. Intel, AMD, nVidia, ARM, none of the big multi-billion-dollar chip manufacturers has dared to step their toes in these waters. And I haven't heard of any bitcoin ASIC company worth 100 million dollars, or any bitcoin-related company that has actually spent 100 million dollars on anything. (Some may own 100M worth of BTC currently, but they bought them much cheaper.) I think the 10 million dollar range was about the highest that I've heard of. But I could be wrong. But the point is, these guys may have been fairly well-off to begin with, but they were not your hedge fund, media mogul, Davos types.
And I will FURTHER note that pooled mining has been pretty much the only decent option, going back pretty far. If you were CPU mining, or were one of the first to GPU mine when everybody else was on CPU's, or one of the first to ASIC mine when everybody else was on GPU's, then maybe it might have made sense to mine solo. Or maybe if you had a datacenter setup with, say, a full rack of machines all hashing away. Then maybe you could mine solo. But if you are just the "guy in his garage" even with a decent number of machines, pooling has been by far the most consistent way to earn BTC for a couple of years now... well before the evil "CORPORATIONS" got involved.