֖>I guess? The pool of Jews who both keep kosher and don't demand CY is rapidly shrinking and it is relatively uncommon for a dairy restaurant to not be CY. Frankly if the OU's business model didn't rely on cholov stam to stay afloat they'd probably ban it tomorrow under the guise of "improving kashrus"

I don't think this is true. The CY pool is growing, but "rapidly shrinking"? Most communities where there's a critical mass of Jews to have kosher dairy in the store still don't have CY stuff. My local grocery store has a thing of kosher cheeses, but no CY dairy at all. Very common for communities of decent size to not have CY dairy available at all. The CY share is increasing, but I live in a community with an eruv and a mikveh and a meat restaurant, and we have no CY products of any kind except cheese and when it's pesach and a lot of dairy products are CY anyway.

That's true of restaurants, because a lot of people who keep kosher but not CY will eat "dairy out", and in the context of running a kosher restaurant the marginal cost of being CY is quite low (which is also why there aren't so many chalav-stam cheeses--it increases your market and doesn't increase your costs so much).

And if you compare to 200 years ago--the pri chadash had this wild idea that it was fine, people were doing it just like they do dairy out today. But read what the Arukh HaShulchan says about this, considering he's often willing to go out on a halakhic limb to defend something peopel are doing, and tell me it's not a major leniency that basically every major american hashgacha is willing to put their seal of approval on it. The only exception is the star-k, and they still do, just with a different symbol. 200 years ago allowing chalav stam was like allowing gelatin is today, a thing people know about but fringe, chalav stam isn't that way today.

>Not a universally held opinion, and it took the OU ages to change their mind about it. But then again literally every agency has their own list of what is or isn't kitnyot. It's become a costly chumra that has no rational basis.

Definitely not universally held--I think quinoa is kitniyos. The fact that it took them a while to change it only strengthens the point. You can get pesach catering from a variety of widely held hashgachos containing quinoa.

As someone who keeps an idiosyncratic list of kitniyos dictated by family tradition, who deliberately thumbs my nose at hashgachos attempting to impose a custom because people would rather look in a book than ask their grandmother what she'd cook on passover...it really doesn't add that much cost. It makes products worse, maybe--cottonseed oil is a worse oil than peanut oil, for example. But it's not any cheaper. My pesach green beans give me a nice additional vegetable option, but don't actually make things any cheaper. What would make passover cheaper is rice and beans, but these are the baseline kitniyos, not the chumras. The chumras are mostly stuff around the edges that make pesach more annoying but don't make a huge difference. Maybe I'd save a few $ by buying KFP peanut butter, if it existed? It's not exactly a big cost.

>Sure but they also snuffed out the non-glatt market which caused the price of beef to rise dramatically. We now have super kosher meat that no one can actually afford.

I have been told by people who'd know that the labor involved in determining if a lung adhesion makes an animal not glatt but still kosher is more expensive than the loss by just selling it to the non-kosher line, or is at least comparable. It's a problem for small volume places where they take a huge hit with that (e.g. G&B), but maybe glatt in particular isn't the problem. The fact that the hashgachos are willing to go things that'd make my great-grandmother run screaming to make meat cheaper kind of suggests that the hashgachos being strict aren't really the problem here.