Agreed- but an app on my own desktop I would be happy to give to, at least instead of a website where they are stored in a database on someone else's box.

What do you mean? Isn't Plaid online, and you have to give them your credentials for them to fetch data for you? (Genuinely curious, never used Plaid myself)

Yes, Plaid stores your credentials. Replicating Plaid-the-service's functionality to run locally would be a large lift...

Unattended import would be downright impossible, as most financial institutions require 2FA (usually SMS, gross) to login. Plaid is often given the privilege to bypass this, either through special APIs or through very long lived session tokens.

Or in some cases, Plaid will literally ask you to input your two-factor code into their site upon login.

Yeah- maybe my intent wasn't clear- I would love to use something like Mint/Plaid where all the credentials stay local on my box rather than on some companies box who now essentially have the keys to my financial kingdom.

Mint but downloadable software that runs locally.