Bitcoiners have not shown much demand to use it as a medium of exchange so if the demand isn't there then the investment won't be there either.

I agree. Other than gift cards, which is just extra steps in a purchase, there is little I would spend my sats on because they are a lot more valuable than the dirty fiat I could use instead. On top of that I don’t want to give Uncle Tom any more of my earnings.

I’m not too technical so can someone explain why this pruned nodes can’t be used.

Note on the tech: Silent Payments require scanning every on-chain transaction for ECDH tweaks. This means the backend cannot run on pruned nodes; it requires high-I/O, performant servers running full nodes plus the Blindbit Oracle indexer.