Convenience for whom?
Let's step back and ask ourselves who the "customer" is in these securities markets. The original purpose of issuing publicly traded shares of stock was for a company to raise money for capital to expand, invest in new opportunities, replace capital equipment, etc. Over the years, stock trading has effectively replaced the company owner with the investor as the "customer" in most trades. Making it more convenient to do this has simply accelerated the process and placed more intermediaries between the company's management and the owners/investors.
Have you noticed that GameStop's management and its business prospects haven't even come up in any of the conversations and media reports about the events of the last few days? This isn't even about GameStop anymore; it's about speculators playing games with its shares.
Interestingly, this is one of the reasons why someone like Donald Trump apparently never liked the idea of going public with his companies. As far as I can tell, his companies were all organized as sole proprietorships or limited partnerships. This limited his options for growth, but it protected him from the uncertainty that comes with losing control of the ownership of your own company.
“Making it more convenient to do this has simply accelerated the process and placed more intermediaries between the company’s management and the owners/investors.”
Then your issue is really with publicly traded stock in general it seems. As long as we are allowing it, and we have the technology to make it easier to do with a lower threshhold of entry, someone is going to be happy to provide that service, since there is a demand for it.
For example, when automobiles were first invented, I’m sure they were quite expensive, and only the richest man in the average town could own one. After Henry Ford came along, everyone could own one. The rich men obviously would be perturbed about all those vulgarians clogging the roads, but if Henry Ford had decided, out of principle, to not make the cars more affordable, someone else would have. Only outlawing driving of cars by the poor could have stopped it.
AOL and others, decades ago.