Lightning Network activation may in fact take many years, if ever, and it may require a new hard fork, Bitcoin Cash style. SegWit took more than a year to finally get activated, and what year that was! SegWit itself is a minor improvement, and while it should pave the path to LN, Lightning Network will be the last thing that Bitcoin miners would agree to. Simply because it would kill their cash cow, and their revenue flow will run dry.
And don't forget the reward halving in just two years.
Lightening Network is in progress, no ETA as of yet. Yeah, implementation might take a couple of years or even a few years. As far as LN and miners are concerned, LN is neither a soft fork nor a hard fork, an additional layer on top of the Bitcoin network so implementation of LN doesn't require consensus.
That sounds good if true. But I still don't understand why it will take so long to develop and implement? It has been in the works for years already and it got activated in Litecoin more than half a year ago. What prevents it from being activated in Bitcoin at least by some of the nodes in the test mode of operation if it doesn't require either hard or soft fork and can be run without changes made to the underlying Bitcoin infrastructure?