I think your point is that since you don't control the miner phsyically, do you have agency over it's hashrate?

You can take the analogy further - if you don't own your power source, do you actually mine?

At the end of the day there is coordination that needs to occur, and you inject yourself into that stack at some layer. I don't think it's possible to be a completely sovereign miner.

Also, your S9 will look great in a museum or on your bookshelf :)

An S9 is only useful as a demo/training model, there's no power source cheap enough to make it profitable.