It pains me to say it after 3 years of building on it but I think lightning is ngmi, at least for non custodial pleb payments.
I think ark and liquid are fundamentally a more sound approach to L2 for end users.
If it REQUIRES the end user to run infrastructure, even if that is just a phone, it's going to be too janky to actually scale.
Not to mention that somehow lightning is already more ossified than L1...
If we continue down the custodian route people will get rugged or KYC d
I am ready for your hate, but this is my current take. Also would be happy to be proven wrong.
Now back to sshing into my node and working on chantools to recover a force closed channel utxo that lnd didn't report.
Totally easy for everyday users to solve if they run into this problem...