You can imagine custodial lightning as people with guest passes to the lightning Network. People with memberships (i.e. node runners) All know exactly what membership costs. It's a lot of work. It's opening channels. It's paying the fees to open those channels. It's paying routing fees. It's managing your software. It's managing your hardware. Even people with nodes in the phones are well aware of the fees involved. Just ask them.

Cheap Bitcoin payments with membership passes that cost the same as a guest pass are the proper way forward. Lightning will never be able to achieve that because of its architecture.

I don't hate lightning, I think it's incredible. But it is not a silver bullet. Do not mistake my criticism as a call for total abandonment of the protocol. I simply think people need to be a little more honest and maybe start looking at other solutions for what is the best way for your grandmother to self-custody Bitcoin and not pay 100 stats per vbyte for transactions, or have to learn the underlying architecture of a protocol.