You can absolutely self-host onion services and bypass the use of VPN, if you’re serving web apps.

Entirely depends on your use case, though.

Agreed. This is what I use for my bittorrent server.

interesting. don’t some controllers have weights inside them to simulate that “heavy” feel anyway? I seem to recall that weight being mostly psychological and not due to required components

$2200 for glasses is insane regardless of what they can do. That’s more than a powerful computer.