With so many large scale miners worldwide, especially in China and northern Europe, I'm not sure individual mining is really a profitable endeavor anymore these days.

Well, initially mining was good business, but the beauty of the bitcoin technology is that it is self-regulating, so as more and more miners jumped on the bandwagon, with increasingly better, faster and more sophisticated hardware, causing the collective computing power of the blockchain to increase tremendously, the algorithm has adjusted itself to be exponentially more complex to solve, meaning you'd need really serious hardware.
Now, if you want to compete with these high tech miners, you'd need very expensive hardware (think tens of thousands of RM) running 24/7 just to have a serious chance to compete, and most likely, the returns you get is not even worth all the electricity bills you'd be paying throughout the year.
Now the competition is even more intense after the halving that happened this year.
It's not impossible, but think very carefully before you decide to go down this path.

Otherwise, the "easier" path to take is the trading or investing path, i.e. buy and sell.