As was already mentioned, on-chain transactions are pretty expensive and thus have some limitations on outputs. Another significant issue with on-chain making it unsuitable for zaps - confirmation takes a lot of time. Lightning on the other hand allows you to transfer small payments pretty fast.
Maybe lightning is not an ideal scaling solution, it is pretty interesting thing to play with.
Lightning would be better if you didn't need channels or to worry about peers. It's very frustrating.
Yes, it is somewhat frustrating, I agree with you on that part. The saddest thing is that to use Lightning you are enforced to HODL some sats, hence you must have them beforehand you can start accepting(!) sats.
Having routing makes things more complicated because it introduces more difficulty in terms of "reachability" of payments.
Unfortunately, this is pretty far from what anyone can install and configure in several clicks.
Anyway, I do not have any idea how Lightning could've been done different without introducing another tradeoffs.
With phoenixd you can use lightning (mostly) self custodial without having bitcoin in the first place.
It collects your first received payments custodial (as "fee credits") and opens a channel to you as soon as you received enough to cover the fees. Very easy to use.
