At the consumer scale the biggest thing we could do is follow the german model of panels that can be plugged into an outlet and installed in an hour by any homeowner (with the same capacity limits and requirements on the panels electronics to protect the grid/line workers during power outages).

That said I'm pretty sure that grid-scale solar is the future of most solar energy, not home solar. It's just cheaper to do things in bigger batches.

This statement is 100% correct, but I think is wrong - utility scale solar is 100% more efficient and cheaper to build at scale, the problem is finding large parcels of land to put it on that are close to where the power consumption is, as well as the complexity and cost associated with grid interconnection (and transition if it not close to demand)

Edit: though if we ever get to self driving cars there should be a whole lot of parking lots in metro areas that aren’t needed.