Recently made this analogy for a friend that worked for a simplistic overview:

Imagine a network of big offices in a city that send large amounts of money to each other in expensive armored cars that are slow and often stuck in traffic.

Now imagine there are an even bigger subset of small offices that occasionally get chunks of money from the big offices

and they send people out on zippy scooters to deliver and pick up the money from the other small offices.

The scooters are much faster and cheaper than the big armored cars, and generally carry much smaller amounts.

Every now and then, a couple of the small offices settle up with one of the big offices.

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Curious if anyone has thoughts to add?

Very simplified I know,

and not dealing with many details like opening/closing channels, channel sizes,forced closes, finding routes etc.