Just how big a problem are small transactions?

Without getting into any math or technical jargon, how big a problem is the issue of small inflows leading to higher transaction costs? Say you get 1,000 payments of 1 rvn and want to send that out as one payment of 1,000 rvn, would that become so expensive that the 1,000 would cost more to send out than it's worth? If not quite that bad, how big of a loss are we talking about? What if you got that through 10,000 payments of 0.10 rvn? 100,000 payments of 0.01 rvn? I understand that there are more factors involved here, but looking just at this particular issue, how bad is it, really?

Also, and this might be a stupid question but the more I try to understand the more I realize I don't quite understand, so I might as well ask. Is the problem contained to your wallet, or would the 1,000 rvn received by the other person become somehow tainted and harder to move?

My understanding is that the lightning network makes a large volume of small transactions viable/cheap, and that since rvn is based on bitcoin, it is theoretically possible to create something equivalent with ravencoin. So, would it be possible to set up a system where you could stake those previously mentioned 1,000 rvn into a payment channel, and effectively dilute those fees with time by being an intermediary?