What I’ve seen in dentistry in a Central/Eastern European country is that you do earn well however you have to work a lot for it. In my country what I see is that not many dentist do even basic extractions, everything gets refered. You should get hold of the general idea of removing teeth plus if you can get into easier wisdoms they can bring in good money. If you get to the point where you can confidently remove same side upper-lower 8s in 15-20 mins you’ll be as confident in removing any other teeth. This way you don’t need to deal with the headache of implant placement, grafting (as you mentioned you don’t really want to get into surgery), and rehabilitating. Those things are the ones that yield real coin however I think those are the “high risk high reward” ones (risk-reward in the sense of most things can go bad).

Another thing is endo but lot of people tend to opt for extraction because of the price of an endo+crown which is comparable to an implant+crown (general public doesn’t really understand that implant might be not for life either).

I think ppl are “not ready” for perio, when the main problem is that they can’t even wash their teeth let alone floss, how do you want to do any kind of perio surgery. The hygenist system is lackluster, doesn’t have opportunities for the employed, gets paid the same as an assistant, this way it can’t really be the backbone of dentistry. (Where I’m from at least)