It seems to me narratives around lightning are changing a little right now.
When it was newly reckless it was the closet cypherpunks Bitcoin scaling system meant to be run on the merest hardware for individual sovereignty.
As we learned that some of its trade-offs made it impractical for even fairly advanced tinkers we watched as professional lightning nodes emerged. Nodes definitely NOT running on raspberry pis and locking up 10s-100s of btc into htlcs and these nodes were the custodial wallet providers, other LSPs and the individuals willing to work a part time job managing their nodes.
So what is the narrative shift?
I think #Aqua is a great example. We are seeing professionals combined lightning with liquid and probably eventually other later twos and LSPs and other services to provide and at least semi sovereign product for users who couldn't even begin to run a lightning node.
It is beginning to look like lightning is going to be more what liquid was sold to be in the beginning. A way for professionals to move value back and forth between large endpoints. While liquid may end up stealing a little of the stage from lightning when it comes to self sovereign simple value transfer. And the combination is really strong. I think once we start seeing some of the other layer 2 frameworks coming up we can go nowhere but up from here.
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