ecash being custodial is a 100% showstopper for me. I don't care with respect to big or small balances. I want to like some other things about it but that's the biggest thing stopping me.

if I can't trustlessly and permissionlessly change ecash tokens back into hard BTC even when a mint is down or hostile, then it's fake bitcoin, an altcoin. people who promote ecash today are promoting altcoins while they pretend not to.

there are possible ways for making it completely unruggable but they most likely require L1 opcodes that aren't activated yet. building ecash on top of lightning is probably also not the best idea because lightning has issues. until the problems are resolved you won't be seeing any serious people trying to use ecash for things like darknet markets.