Diving into Ethereum staking after Shanghai – my setup headaches and questions for the community

Hey everyone, I've been running a solo validator for about 8 months now and wanted to share some concrete details from my experience post-Shanghai upgrade since it feels like the subreddit has been light on real-user staking stories lately. I started with 32 ETH on mainnet using Lighthouse + Geth on a used Dell OptiPlex with 32GB RAM and a 1TB NVMe drive, mostly because I wanted to avoid the big pools and actually control my keys. Before the upgrade withdrawals were basically impossible without full exit, but now I've been able to pull out 0.4 ETH in partial rewards last month to cover electricity and still keep the validator happy. What surprised me most was the MEV-Boost integration – I had to switch from the default relay to Flashbots after seeing my effective APR drop to 3.1% for two weeks straight; the concrete difference was an extra 0.12 ETH over 30 days once I configured the builder API correctly with mev-boost 1.6.0. Hardware-wise the Pi 4 I tried first kept crashing on sync after the Dencun changes so I migrated everything to the desktop and added a 2TB external SSD for the archive node because geth was eating 800GB+ alone. Gas fees for the withdrawal credential change were only 0.0008 ETH which felt almost too cheap compared to 2021 levels, but I still double-checked the contract address against Etherscan three times before signing. One thing I'm still puzzled about is why my attestation success rate dipped to 96% for a few days even though uptime was 99.8% – turned out to be a beacon chain checkpoint issue after a recent client update. Anyone running similar hardware seeing the same? Also curious how people are handling the new 0x01 withdrawal credentials in terms of tax tracking since the partial withdrawals create way more on-chain events than before. Would love to hear specific client configs or relay recommendations that have worked for others without getting rate-limited. Thanks in advance, this community has been super helpful with my earlier posts about testnet debugging.