Satoshi said that offchain transaction should be just for micropayments
As far as I know, satoshi did not mention offchain transactions at all because he did not consider it likely that the network would reach its current block size limits. He certainly didn't say "offchain transactions should be just for micropayments" because BTC itself is supposed to be for micropayments.
Regardless of what satoshi said, offchain transactions will be great for payments of <$100 and payments which require extreme security IMO. The Lightning Network is a good middle ground between BTC and fiat - it brings convenience, and you can still have the blockchain's eternal security whenever you want.
but no matter how cool the actual transactions are, it still seems muddy how the channels will route, who hosts them, how they can propagate further and a bunch of other things and that's the truly important part.
Yep, it's too early to tell how those things will work out. How I'm looking at it'll be moderately centralised, but that's sort of fine considering that no one in an LN transaction actually has access to the funds except the people sending and receiving it.
