Lightning is not bad. It's, frankly, amazing technology. It's just ill-suited to small scale nodes. It was fine when fees were low b/c the problems were hidden. But now fees are permanently high so the devs that were pushing the state of the art of lightning self-custody are coming to terms with this reality.

The most private solution for fast settlement is looking like large LN nodes that offer privacy preserving custodial IOUs. When your stack of IOUs gets big enough, withdraw to cold storage. This is the 99% solution. It's WoS with good privacy. You might get rugged for your tipping wallet. Big deal; it's better than maintaining a lightning node and dealing with liquidity, force closes, mempool fee storms, server uptime, etc.

We need to soft fork again to bring on the next cohort of self-custodial bitcoin users. This is the real battle. It's playing out on github, the mailing list, delving, and other bitcoin developer forums, and even on twitter. But, as usual, the quality of discourse on twitter is low. WYGD? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯