Waves Platform is great - especially having POS4all applicable tokens that give you free tokens. WAVES themselves are pretty cheap and the entire blockchain runs near instant transactions.

I have some of the following that are POS4all activated to give you an idea - but I'm not an expert on them or anything or shilling these ones - but I get a little bit either daily or weekly on the following tokens. These are verified assets too - not sham/scam or sh*t tokens that are all over the place. And some of these have leasing nodes so you get other rando tokens just for having them leased as well.

WCT Waves Community Token
MER Mercury
OCL OceanLabs
CWV Cryptowave
WGO WavesGo
TN TurtleNode

Thanks - super easy to find 

ETH Address: 0xD3b2331f9043c0E297377761B1c7857ae061519d
Reddit Subs: Username :Leeke80 https://imgur.com/LoTqOZt
Reddit Upvote: https://imgur.com/Kh3mPSw

With not being able to predict what ETH (or any cryptos) are likely to be like over the next year - why not hedge your bets and do 33/33/33 over all options (own hardware/Cloud/Trading)?

Hypothetically if I had $20k then I'd just buy the 20k worth of ETH.

However, if you buy the mining rig you can adapt as the year goes by. You might be able to mine something at a lower diff than ETH and therefore make more than the expected growth from having held your ETH all year. You also need to factor in all the ongoing requirements of keeping your machines running and electricity so depending on your ability and desire in doing that - it could very well be that annoyance of mining and controlling your rigs outweighs its customisation.

At the end of the day - everyone is going to spread the risk and development strats based on what they are comfortable with.