Someone confirm something for me. Covenants let you put bitcoin into a restricted address such that you know what can and cannot be done with the bitcoin.

What I don't quite get is how it helps with regards to fees. Yes you can close a channel or do a coinjoin with less outputs and therefore pay less fees there, but won't the overall cost be higher?

You can use covenants to make it cheaper to consolidate small utxos (other than reducing load on the Blockchain and driving the fee market down)

Do covenants enable us to do more trustless collaborative transactions in ways we can't do today?

The other thing I worry about is that we all know that economic Bitcoiners regulate the network. If a transaction goes in a block that you think is invalid, you will refuse to accept it and you'll reference the valid block for all of your future transactions, making it more valuable for miners to swap to your chain.

Now if more things happen in aggregate, we start to concentrate who is influencing the network. Its a bit like mining pools influencing mining templates.

If we get things like channel factories and utxo pools, what will ensure that the majority of minds are able to express their opinions on the network?

Being able to choose between service providers seems subpar since this tends to create a class device and service providers might trend towards doing similar things like Visa and MasterCard do.