My experience here is pretty similar. I'm heavily (emotionally at least) invested in models running locally, I refuse to build something around a remote AI that I can only interact with through an API. But I'm not going to pretend that LLaMA has been amazing locally. I really couldn't figure out what to build with it that would be useful.
I'm vaguely hoping that compression actually gets better and that targeted reinforcement/alignment training might change that. GPT can handle a wide range of tasks, but for a smaller AI it wouldn't be too much of a problem to have a much more targeted domain, and at that point maybe the 30B model is actually good enough if it's been refined around a very specific problem domain.
For that to happen, training needs to get more accessible though. Or communities need to start getting together and deciding to build very targeted models and then distributing the weights as "plug-and-play" models you can swap out for different tasks.
And if there's a way to get 65B more accessible, that would be great too.