> Mining at a rate necessary to get any reasonable amount of Ether is a huge investment,
I started mining on my own PC a couple weeks ago, with the GPUs I already had (2x 1080ti) and made about 0.5 Ether so far. So it's definitely not impossible to get enough currency that enables you to interact or even deploy a smart contract on a consumer PC with a little bit of time.
I just use PhoenixMiner. Anything that has the feature of reducing memory latency ('-straps 2'). Getting 47 mhash/s per 1080ti with that.
I actually had to spin up a Virtual Machine with GPU passthrough to launch Windows because I couldn't get the GPU tweaks working on Linux. Really nice how vfio is now in the Linux kernel, it's been a breeze going through the setup (compared to a couple years ago when you needed a custom kernel.)
I started mining on my own PC a couple weeks ago, with the GPUs I already had (2x 1080ti) and made about 0.5 Ether so far. So it's definitely not impossible to get enough currency that enables you to interact or even deploy a smart contract on a consumer PC with a little bit of time.