What are techniques for making Facebook mobile app install (MAI) campaigns profitable?

Mobile app install (MAI) campaigns using just interest targeting are very difficult to make profitable for games unless the games are very, very broadly appealing.

In my opinion, the only reason to use interest targeting for MAI campaigns is to build a large funnel into your game that you can then start harvesting custom audience LaL lists from, preferably using high-value payers. Note that if you are starting from scratch -- that is, you need to establish the initial seed lists and build a set of payers from 0 -- this is a time consuming and expensive process. I wrote about that here: The slow and costly process of scaling user acquisition

But trying to move into AEO or VEO campaigns before you have these lists won't work -- not really. You might get a small trickle of users, and they'll likely pay, but without a large enough LaL audience to target against, you'll never really be able to scale an AEO or VO campaign. So you have to do this initial step, which is harvesting lots of users cheaply using MAI campaigns and building lists from the valuable ones.

You can incrementally increase the value of these lists by building them off of increasingly valuable behavioral signals. For instance, you might:

1. Build a list of Day 1 retainers, target that;
2. Build a list of Day 3 retainers, target that; 
3. Build a list of payers, target that;
4. Build a list of high-value payers, target that, etc.

This is slow, iterative, frustrating, and expensive. But if you are starting from 0, I don't see any other way on Facebook.