Maybe we need a second hype similar to the year end of 2017, when the transactions were sitting in the mempool for days before they got confirmed in the end... even if they had very high fees compared to the normal days before and after....
That time the demand for the LN was higher than now, despite of the system was in an earlier status, with less functionality and similar things...
That's not going to work: At the fee-peak in 2017, it took about $25 for a small transaction to get a confirmation. A transaction funding a LN-channel is bigger (in bytes), and you'll need a similar transaction to close the channel. You may be looking at $100 to fund and close a channel, and there's no amount of small coffee payments that can justify that.
For LN-nodes, that leads to small dust inputs, which is very expensive to consolidate again, so they may just stop accepting new channels.
If I may add my own "maybe": Maybe we'll get a LN-board (or second-layer-board) when there's more demand, and more merchants accept LN. I recently paid a $1 VPS through LN, and the fact that they accept LN was the only reason to buy it. I still want to travel to
Arnhem (Dutch) to buy groceries and pay through LN
I realize I'm going off-topic, but I like LN's potential.
Would it help if I make "1 thread to list them all", like my
GUIDES-topic, until there's a LN-board?