Monetizing relays is not “making Nostr inaccessible unless you pay.” I think you misunderstand the bigger picture here.  Read some of the thread, there are a ton of great ideas and no one is talking about making it so new users can’t join and start exploring and commenting for free. You are completely correct on that point, it would relegate this space to a tiny group, which would defeat the purpose I laid out above, is how do we *avoid* that. 

In that sense, I’m hoping for thoughts and feedback on how we can find this ecosystem, *without* the barrier you correctly identify.