You're not wrong, Danny. Our spectrum is very valuable, and the only thing that's stopped most forays into it are the relatively large antennas needed to make broadband work. 420-440 would be the biggest antennas of the bunch if MIMO schemes were implemented, and most of those radios would need an external antenna(s) to work effectively. And, the other thing that saves us is that these frequencies are usually secondary to, or co-primary with government radiolocation. If we had to stand up for ourselves, we would have lost them already, particularly since a frequency audit would only reveal pockets of activity, rather than continued use. I've said it before, I'll say it again: amateur radio spectrum should be taken away from the FCC and given to the Department of the Interior to steward as a "Spectrum National Park." Giving DoI the unusual is not unprecedented.
As for Chinese radios, those would be the kind that younger people could afford. They wouldn't be able to afford the top of the line Flex or Yaesu radios, or giant towers. Yet, the fact that they're not really buying them in greater quantities reflects their desire for non-voice communication with much, much greater bandwidth. The other thing is the age disparity. My kids don't necessarily want to chat with someone my age (heck, they usually don't want to talk to me...). My kids don't necessarily want to chat with anyone by voice. Contrast that to many decades ago when you couldn't get a teenager off a phone. So, times have changed. I'm waiting for the text-over-amateur-radio device that doesn't look like an improvised whatever with wires sticking out of it built into a toolbox or run at a ponderous 1.2 kbps. Make a smartphone that has off-network features for amateur radio in voice and data, with an acceptable price break that younger people will go for, and there might be an uptick. But few of us will recognize it as "our grandfather's ham radio."
Now, don't get my post as being all doom-and-gloom. There's a bigger picture here that goes beyond ham radio. We need to get kids involved in STEM programs. Ham radio offers the brownspace - both in spectrum and modes - for our future generation of engineers. After all, we do want some of our own children being engineers in the future, not just people from far away lands.
Where I see activity in amateur radio -- and the retailers can capture this if they were smart -- are the building blocks projects that integrate canned hardware to custom-written code. Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and other prototyping platforms seem to be very popular and are this generation's equivalent to building stuff out of tubes and components fished out from TVs that were put out in the trash (anybody else do that besides me?). In my view, that's where the promise is, and that's why we need to hold fast on the spectrum. If we've sold it all out, our technology becomes completely pay-to-play. THEN we're in trouble.
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