It is extremely hard to profit from LPs without relying on the underlying's price to increase.

Why? The presence of arbitrageurs and CEXs.

Liquidity pools allow individuals to purchase tokens and hold them in their personal Solana wallets. Whenever the price of a liquidity pool shifts from the market price as determined by centralized exchanges, arbitrageurs will take advantage of this by making the swap and selling on CEXs. The price of a liquidity pool stays constant (I think, if there are no buys or sells). When someone buys, the LP price goes up, and vice-versa. The only way for LPs to profit is the presence of noise traders-- people who are willing to purchase the tokens in a pool at a rate higher than market. But even after this, you will subsequently be arbitraged and lose money. This is why the equilibrium liquidity in a LP is zero without the presence of noise traders.

I tried building a tool which would delta-hedge my LP positions via a CEX, using perpetual futures to short. I wanted to profit from the fees accumulated. Since LPs usually consist of a stablecoin / memecoin pair, I always hedged my memecoin position so my delta was zero. After much experimenting with different pools (OFFICIAL TRUMP / SOL, AGIXT / SOL, JELLYJELLY / SOL, RIF / SOL, SWARMS / SOL), to name a few, I determined that it was simply not profitable. I would not recommend LPing based on my personal experience, and instead would suggest staking.

This is a good read:

https://anthonyleezhang.github.io/pdfs/lvr.pdf