Ark is DOA due to that colluding risk IMO. Lightning is the king of layer 2s.
Discussion
Lightning is the only trustless L2 that exists, but Ark might not be DOA because most people might just not care about the trust assumption
Scaling via compromising on trust-minimization is lame. If the lightning network is only used for transactions that need less trust (rather than all low-value txs), then it will struggle to grow big enough to handle routing for all low value transactions.
By using other L2s like cashu and ark, Lightning withers… ⚡️
LN is not good for onboarding. Do you have suggestions on how to fix that?
Large fees for creating a channel is indeed a great barrier to seamless onboarding. I don’t have any solutions yet.
You could open the channel when the onchain fee are low.
There is only so much blockspace for all of us. The authors of the original whitepaper itself (https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf) thought we would need a blocksize increase in the long term. I don't want any blocksize increase, but lightning (as it is today) alone is not the solution

Now I see that I answered a note on a big thread. Now I can’t say anything about the main subject because I haven’t read the whole thread, if I read I’ll come back here.
Lightning has a lot of issues. Maybe the risk is worth the reward for certain amounts.