Presented like this it remind me of the pb with buffered io when the io is too slow downstream, and adding a buffer will just end up with the same blocked io latter with a bigger buffer. Buffered can just help smoothing the ups & down, and it would be a bit like putting a time out on the write io, without really checking the all the data actually been sent at the end of the time out ;p knowing that most likely the throughput of LN is much higher than blockchain, it still lead to the question if the tx can be really processed on the chain before the lock expire, and if the goal is to write them on chain at the end, if it's really going to do this faster.
Idk to me LN doesn't seem too bad in itself, but I just find there is something a bit askew with the mechanism of locking & parallel processing.
I think you've misunderstood the principle of the LN. The idea of the LN is NOT to have a "buffered" list of transactions that have to go on-chain. If that were the case, it wouldn't have any purpose. The danger with the LN is that "by panic" it becomes such a system at a certain point. But normally, the LN has more or less the following principle.
Consider first a toy LN with 2 nodes, Alice and Bob. I even think that this embryonic proposal was already in Satoshi's paper.
Alice and bob want to pay one-another several times. They could simply do that each time on-chain. But they could also put each of them, say, 100 coins in an escrow-type of wallet (on chain). Now, suppose that Alice wants to pay 20 coins to Bob. She could send a *transaction signature* to Bob that would allow Bob to obtain 20 coins from Alice's wallet ; only, the idea is that Bob doesn't broadcast that transaction, but simply keeps the signature on his disk. If later, Bob wants to pay 20 coins to Alice, he sends HER a transaction signature, which would override the signature HE obtained from Alice IF EVER he broadcasted it. And if Alice now pays 20 coins to Bob again, she can send HIM a transaction signature that would override Bob's signature that would have overridden Alice's first signature if ever it was broadcasted.
The whole idea is that people send one-another transaction signatures that override previously obtained transaction signatures.
In other words, if at the end of the day, those 20 coins went 50 times to Bob, and 51 times to Alice, Alice and Bob have simply exchanged signatures amongst themselves, and NOTHING HAPPENED ON THE BLOCK CHAIN. When they both want to quit, they can opt to:
1) send eachother the final signatures to release the coins to one another in the right amounts of the final balance, if they cooperate
2) DUMP THEIR WHOLE LIST OF TRANSACTIONS on the chain, which will then result in 50 transactions from Alice to Bob, and 51 transactions from Bob to Alice, ending up doing the same.
If the LN link "finishes cleanly" with mutual cooperation, then both of them could have exchanged even 1000 signatures, at the end of the day, only one or two transactions make the final balance on chain. The idea is that there's no way to cheat, if you try to cheat, the partner dumps the whole list of transactions and obtains in any case what was the final balance. And you're motivated NOT to do that, because you'd have to pay 1000 transaction fees, while now, you can do with only one.
The LN blows this scale up: instead of having 2 nodes exchanging coins back and forth, a node can open such 1-1 links to several partners, making up a mesh. Suppose that Alice is connected to Bob and Claire, and Bob is connected to Joe and Jack. If Alice wants to pay Jack, she can send the money to Bob who can send it to Jack (with a safeguard that Bob cannot keep it). A lot of payments can hence travel across a lot of 1-1 links without a single on-chain transaction. A node has to go "on chain" if his balance drops to 0 of course. Each time the partners cooperate, they can just do one or two transactions to get to the final balance ; if not, they dump ALL their transactions on chain and obtain the same result but with much more transaction fees.
Note: I simplified. The LN is somewhat more involved. But you get the idea.