That was painful. Here is my summary:
Lightning doesn’t work because it does not scale to 8 billion people in a fully private self custodial way thus the project is a complete failure and should be abandoned so we can invest our time in something else.
Vs
Lightning works as evidenced by the fact that people and companies use it every day and I just zapped someone right now from my self custody lightning wallet to theirs. It will form an integral part of how people in the future use bitcoin either through their direct participation in lightning or as a communication layer between emerging protocols such as ecash.