I sense from your responses that your hope is LN will offer near-zero fees while also being non-custodial with an economically viable unilateral exit. I understand it was sold this way by some folks but it isn't reality. LN's fees are a function of on-chain fees, which are going to be volatile and will continue to increase over time.

There are efforts to try and share UTXOs with more people which would allow for amortizing these costs over more people. This is awesome R&D, and I hope to see more of it. But so far, I've yet to see a design that doesn't result in some other tradeoff, such as a vastly more expensive unilateral exit or some other trust assumption.

I'm also not sure if you're understanding the point I'm trying to make. I'm saying LN has already succeeded at product market fit, but for something other than what you're imagining. I'm not saying it offers no/low fee non-custodial payments, but I am instead saying it is THE open payment protocol, connecting not only non-custodial LN wallets and custodial LN wallets but also wallets that use entirely different designs such as Fedimint, Cashu, Ark, and statechains. All of these different solutions already support LN as the open payment protocol. There's evidence that indicates LN solves that problem. Hence, product-market fit.

As for bitcoin as p2p currency, you're free to move on, but I'm going to continue working toward that as a north star. Each and every year we'll inch closer toward that, but we also shouldn't shy away from practical, useful products and designs that work today and are moving toward that north star. 

 You are right, i was stupid enough to believe it could work in a self custodial way with low fees. The way it evolved so far is a shame in my opinion, most people use custodial wallets due to the terrible UX with self hosted LN.

In the end, we just recreate a banking / paypal system where people get KYCed, have to follow AML rules, have zero privacy and not even low fees. Ridiculous.  Slowly the smaller lightning service providers will be bought up from the larger ones. Just like banks.

Custodial services will inflate the supply over time eventually, because it is easy to do and nobody can check if they do it or not. 

I got into Bitcoin because it promised P2P self custodial digital cash, which would be revolutionary. To me it seems this chance is gone on BTC until something drastically changes, which i do not see at the moment.

But i can not complain, we dreamed of dumping on wall street and now the ones interested in freedom can finally do it and move on. 

I would not have thought i would ever say that but BCH is the real Bitcoin.