Are there benefits to solo mining?

Hey, can anyone break down why some miners opt for solo mining Bitcoin on their own nodes instead of joining a pool? Are there any perks to going solo?

Since you don't mention any example, i would speculate people who do that is hobbyist who don't want to rely on 3rd party (mining pool). After all, solo mining pool usually have better block propagation compared with full node run on home internet connection.

The advantage? Sure, if you hit a block, you get the entire reward without sharing. The problem? You might wait years or forever before finding anything with normal hardware. Solo mining on 'bitcoin' I tried it once and wasted electricity for two months with zero rewards. It's like playing the lottery with your power bill.  Meanwhile, pool miners as a big group of miner lets say most of them are usually earn consistent payouts.

They mine to their personal node because they can just for the heck of it. However as said above:Because of that, it is not a good idea to mine to your personal node. While orphan races do hot happen that often, any solo pool such as Kano.is or solo.ck do have very fast propagation when a block is found. It'd be a bitch to get a block and then lose it because a different block from a miner with faster connections was confirmed before yours. The 0.5 to 2% pool fee is not all that much to pay for peace of mind. Don't get me wrong - running a node to support the BTC network IS a good thing. Just don't mine to it.

okay privacy? free power? bizarre belief systems? other? all or some of the above?

Those who do this as a hobby, pet or side project are those who will be likely into solo mining. They may also 100% of the rewards to themselves without wanting to share with other. With solo mining you are less likely to get scammed unlike in pool mining where if you join a shady pool, you may not make the pay out to your wallet. So this point is that the fear of getting scammed maybe as a result of previous experience may make people choose solo mining.