If you want to be multihomed, the costs for routers & co. are far higher than for being LIR. If you can't afford being LIR, be single-homed.
Sure ? Small providers tend to use open source software (like zebra) and have 2 x 10 or 2 x 100 Mbit/s to different providers, so your argument is not really true. But i understand your intentions, seen from provider perspective are right.
I think there are customers who have the need for redundancy but, not the need for a LIR. Actually a LIR is only needed if you have large amounts of address space to manage. That is at least always the way I have looked at LIRs. They have nothing to do with the routing policy. Now, you can have a small amount of address space, but sill have the need for resilience/redundancy/multiple uplinks. - kurtis -