I agree. I mine myself, and I arrived at the same conclusions pretty much (wound up employing my own Antminer's (now I am currently using S7 series, hoping to move to s9 when more become available).
It takes work, to run your own miners (not a lot, but a little).In the end, however, the effort is worth it, and cloud mining doesn't ever seem to make much money at it (other than maybe the operators).