While the Lightning Network isn’t perfect, it is improving. Channels and liquidity will grow, even if slowly.

Eventually #Bitcoin and Lightning will be adopted and used by mainstream merchants, merchants who run their own nodes and channels would likely save money on rebalancing their channels over paying credit card companies.

The more Lightning and #Bitcoin are adopted, the bigger the incentives to keep it running, even perfect it.

Current efforts to enable offline/async payments show this, and will be beneficial for both users and node runners.

The only options in the works for async payments, that I know of, are: trampoline relay payments, Lightning Rod, and Point Time Locked Contracts.