im several steps ahead of the understanding of LN.. ran scenarios. and the hop/route model has issues. once you understand the whole multisig part of it and then realise the magnitude of channels required just to get 1 million people connected and then realise its not like users can have just 1 payment deposit (channel open) you start to realise people need to pump alot of funds in. and dilute their spendability between each of those channels
then with people limiting how much of THEIR funds they allow to use for the 'lending' process of the hop concept. again this limits utility
its worth you running scenarios of long term real world utility. because right now. LN devs are just looking at will ONE payment get from source to destination without a bug.
they are not really at the point of thinking about real world usage between many people with different life circumstances, spending habits, spendability
All three dev teams are looking at ways to optimise and improve the route/hop model, batching transactions, atomic multi-path, etc. It's only going to get better as time goes on. It is perfectly fair to say, though, that the more channels you happen to have open at any given time, the more utility you'll gain from it. But it's fair to assume that people will generally prioritise LN usage with the people or companies they most often transact with and just have channels open with them. Then, all of those transactions being off-chain clears more space in blocks for when you need to send/receive a regular on-chain transaction to/from someone you've never dealt with before. It's by no means the end of the scaling issue, but it will definitely help.
Plus, if Lightning gives us the option to hop to another blockchain via ACCT, we can potentially have a few different security levels for our transactions using other coins that support Lightning. Litecoin will almost certainly be on board, so if I want to send a large, valuable transaction, I'll use BTC, for medium amounts and values, I could potentially choose to send LTC, with both the recipient and I confident in the knowledge they can exchange it for BTC again later without sending funds to a centralised exchange. There will probably even be coins better suited for small amounts which support Lightning. That all helps with scalability too. In time, Lightning will effectively knit the entire crypto-verse together, making every worthwhile blockchain completely interoperable and fungible, while also still being completely permissionless. Does that level of promise and potential not excite you?
