I don't like lightning. I still test it once in a while to see how it's doing. Recently I had a ~$50 lightning payment fail between cash app and one of the services aggregated by trocador. It couldn't find a path between the two services. Then just today, I was unable to send any amount from river to minibits for the same reason. Wallets that rely on the boltz integration such as aqua and more popular wallets like strike seem to be better connected within the network.

This is not what I signed up for years ago. I was led to believe that cryptocurrency payments are unstoppable. The technology enabled me to send and receive any amount to anyone else on the network. I did not have to worry about payment routing or anything. Everyone was connected to everyone else. This will not be the case in a future with scarce blockspace dominated by lightning service providers. I can either compete for artificially scarce blockspace, or hope that my custodian of choice has good connectivity with the person I want to pay. Banks will make the rules. You can see the benefits of this technology are degrading over time. This is why payment channels are not the answer to the scaling problem.