I mean PoW is basically rich get richer too (you need money to get hashrate). Not much worse off, IMO.
PoW allows anyone to get involved. E.g. you can start with your gaming rig, which you've already paid for, and simply go from there. The lowest cost of entry is the current price of a used beat-up RX470 8G or GTX1060 6G. Not having a $100K budget on hardware does not prevent you even from solo-mining for the sake of participating and supporting the network. Bitcoin never went away from this principle: you can mine on your core2 laptop and still have a chance of solving a block(it's not effective, but you get where I'm going with this). That was the whole idea.
With staking - anyone who can't afford 32ETH is automatically disqualified from participating (even at current exchange rate it's a shitton of money).
Staking pools are also a high-risk endeavor. My GPUs are warming my feet right now, so I know where my investment is. With PoS - I can't tell with 100% certainty whether my money will be used for staking or something I didn't sign up for. It's a perfect ground for the
actual pyramid scams (people nowadays seem to confuse or misunderstand what it is). E.g. instead of staking they'll simply pay "pseudo-earnings" to early birds from deposits of newcomers in order to build up reputation and "pot size" until it's good enough to disappear.
Another big difference, is that right now people have an option to mistrust their mining pool, or mining aggregator, or online wallet, and move their assets around or diversify as they're pleased. With staking you have a financial incentive to keep all of your chickens in the same coup, so in case of staking pyramids, you aren't losing a week's worth of shares - you are losing everything.
With this in mind, if you aren't some filthy-rich bastard from beyond the wall, your only option is to chose the biggest and the most trusted staking pool, which in term means.... you guessed it - even more centralization. I'm sure by the time this transition is fully done, we'll have our usual suspects like top 20-25 in this list (e.g. the usual suspects):
View top ranking cryptocurrency exchanges based on trust score, trade volume in the last 24 hours, number of coins and pairs available, web traffic, and more.
www.coingecko.com
Another big downside, is that people aren't incentivized to move their money around (spend, invest, etc). From your typical high-school course on introductory economics we all know that idle money gives no economic growth. I don't mean the money in your savings account, cause all that means is that you've entrusted your bank to invest/move your money around with a guarantee that you'll get it back whenever you need it. I mean, money that's stashed under your mattress for a rainy day. Only with staking it's gonna be one helluva big communal mattress which creates even more money that does nothing. As a staking participant(or legit staking pool) you have more incentive just to leave your money alone, and only use it in case of emergency. This creates less transactions, and as a consequence - even less staking rewards.
Nowadays people call bitcoin a "digital gold", cause it's expensive, limited, and hard to move around (TX fees, which you've mentioned). So, rich people put it in their treasure chests as a long-term investment.
ETH2.0 will be like your retirement fund (or 401k for Yankees). You only touch it in case of absolutely major emergency, or if you expect to be dead within the next 10 years.
In summary to my short rant: we may agree on mining inefficiency, but there are many other ways to solve this issue. PoS is only one solution, but Buterin with his team decided to chose the most unfair, unsafe, and rigged way of doing it. ETH is still promising as a base model for future crypto, but I don't want it to die soon after. I'm just talking out of my neck here, but in my opinion there are too many red flags already, and many more on the way.
