Spark is mostly okay honestly. The biggest trade off I've seen is that if you do happen to have a provider that for whatever reason is not letting you make the transactions you want, you have to just take your coins and go try another way. They can't rug you, which of course is a heck of a lot better than custodial, but you're still a little at their mercy when it comes to a lot of decision making, including some fee decision as well as, you know, technically being able to censor who you can pay. In practice the incentives align enough that I think Spark is probably going to be fine for most people, and being able to start getting paid on lightning without needing to open any channels or have any liquidity set up is a pretty major move forward. I won't say I know it inside and out to really be solid on all the edge cases but having listened to a few decent podcasts and chatting with AI about it quite a bit it seems worthwhile.

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Wait Spark is fine because it's a trusted 3rd party that can't steal your coins but provides a better UX. so what's the problem with trusting someone elses node then? It sure looks to me like you've just replaced the trust assumptions on a higher layer. the only advantage being that companies like Spark and Blockstream now have a business model of selling solutions to artificially constrained L1 throughput.