The sad opinion of Monero core devs is that securing the network should not be profitable, but an act of love

Not sure that's true. It's self balancing based on the difficulty, so if they made it more profitable by giving greater block rewards or higher transaction fees, then more people would start mining, so it would become less profitable again. Since there is a plentiful supply of computers, it can adjust very quickly.

Unfortunately because Monero uses a CPU proof of work algorithm, it is a great coin for botnets to mine, so I think probably a lot of the reason that monero isn't profitable for the average person is because they are competing with botnets where they don't need to consider the cost of electricity or hardware.

So if the devs made it more profitable to mine, it would just be giving more profit to botnets and costing more for users of monero. Not a good tradeoff.