Just getting started now farming Chia with the expectation to solo mine is not realistic at this point. The net space growth rate has exceeded even the most optimistic expectations of the development team. For this reason, they have made officially implementing pooling their #1 priority and we should hear some updates soon. They have suggested that in order start farming on a pool, you would need to re-plot, so that the plots can be portable and can be used at different pools if you choose. This would mean in the beginning everyone looking to join a pool would effectively be starting from scratch, so there is an advantage in having the hardware ready to go if you plan on doing pool farming.
I don't think comparing Chia as a Burst coin 2.0 is a fair comparison. For one, the development and marketing teams at Chia are first rate and have wide recognition in the tech industry. Then there is also the programming language developed for Chia which would enable things like smart contracts, comparable to ETH. If the 'green crypto mining' that is being promoted catches on in a new market sector, I could definitely see XCH being a leader in that sector.
Pooled mining would make things better. I'm looking forward to it, since mining with hard drives is much more cost-effective than mining with ASICs or GPUs. Burst didn't turn out to become a success back then, so I'm wary about the new Chia project. What concerns me is the amount of centralization that exists in Proof of Capacity coins like Chia and Burst. Data centers may accumulate the most space on the network, effectively putting the Blockchain in the hands of big cloud storage companies like Google, Amazon, and Dropbox. The average person like you and me will be left out of the system as mining becomes extremely unprofitable. I hope that Chia doesn't turn out to be this way in the long run. Developers should focus on balancing between decentralization and scalability for the project to succeed in the mainstream world. How far will Chia go will greatly depend on mainstream adoption. With huge competition in the crypto/Blockchain space, I fail to see if Chia will become a success in the future. Just my thoughts