Good point you bring up with Zeus because it can function as a remote for your home node, or as a “node in the phone” line Phoenix now with the new beta. Breez and Blixt are also “node in phone” wallets. Breez UI is more user friendly for the casual/new user and hides advanced settings in the menus, whereas Blixt moves those advanced settings into the UI. My main point was that while Phoenix is reliable but it only opens channels with the ACINQ node, Breez, Blixt, and Zeus (node in phone) all allow you to open channels to any nodes you want, although they do each have a default LSP if you just want to use that.
Discussion
I'm not too concerned with ui complexity, worst case scenerio is I learn some stuff I eventually need to learn anyway. Functionality is much more important. Counting on lsp was the root cause of non-custodial payment failures for me yesterday & while they may be a step in the right direction or a good backup plan, they just aren't reliable enough to utilize for casual transactions yet. So, regardless of which wallet, opening some private channels sounds like the way to go. Is it possible to attempt payments through lsp & fall back private channels before expiry? Or I guess, does an invoice even allow for multiple route attempts?
Not sure. That will depend on the wallet probably. Lightning wallets try to calculate the best path/routes available and will try several before failing the payment. Some wallets let you define stuff like the maximum fees and hops, or the initial outgoing channel/hop.
Ok, cool, thanks. I noticed some of those fields in Zeus but given that I have been attempting to use it as a stand-alone, I didn't even bother with them.