So can understand retail traders who likes manual trading and avoids the futures arena as it seems will be very tough for "manual" traders in the future to do futures. They will have to hire programmers as I see it to keep up. But then again I mostly think about NQ. I never cared about the rest. From what I read about history the big algo boom in 2000s shook the retail traders. Now it seems another level of HFT is arising. Theres ways to adapt to this new HFT arising, but due to AI rapidly growing now too. I would if I was a professional manual trader do anything to escape markets heavily influenced by HFT as much as possible. I can see how futures prop firms lick their mouths without the unknowingly newbie retail traders as the HFT decreases the chance of success for the manual trading as time moves on now.
This is just some unbiased newbie view.