Is not about the easiness of deploying LN nodes. Is much more.
Discussion
I didn’t elaborate but when I say management I mean fees, rebalancing, monitoring, alerts, channel selection, etc. It’s a word that can mean almost anything and everything.
It’s already tons easier than when I started. A lot of other automations are higher risk but I see possible engineering trade offs.
It’s like saying no one will use email because you have to telnet into the mainframe, setup a build environment, install dependencies, compile the client, and configure it. This is how email used to work but now it’s almost transparent. Most people have never even heard of SMTP or POP3.
When you use an LN node wallet like Blixt, OBW, Breez, you are using a real Lightning node, but you do not forward and route payments.
This is much better and simpler for normal users than having to maintain their own routing node.
There’s no need to have all people in the world running their own routing node. In fact that would be total chaos and unscalable. Lightning has its own set of scalability problems with pathfinding and source routing.
Routing will became a specialization, just like Bitcoin mining is today.
No amount of automatization will improve things, it will likely just mean you won’t be able to have a ROI, unless you have a lot of capital or some other edge over the others.
If you’re worried about privacy, as I am, I think that gets solved with more robust socks proxy support so I can tunnel over i2p in addition to tor.
The real bottleneck is having spare liquidity. Not everyone has 100,000,000 sats needed to open decent channels.