you're overthinking it. and in the meantime LN works great. your analysis is obviously wrong somewhere, but your ideological position prevents you from accepting that fact and re-evaluating your assumptions.
again: LN doesn't need to optimally solve np-hard or worse problems to work, good-enough approximations are easy to find.
It works great at tiny scales between small cliques of people who know each other. And it has for years.
But it can't and never will work at large network sizes without being centralized. And no amount of development work will fix that, because it's a core design flaw.
Which is why the meme with LN was "its 18 months away from wherever you are in time".
It's always in early stages, because it can only achieve early stage levels of usability without devolving into a centralized system. By design.
> Which is why the meme with LN was "its 18 months away from wherever you are in time".
yeah, if memes are the way you keep yourself informed on the topic then i totally understand your point of view.
the reality is that LN works and what you call "small cliques" are just subnets that route payments internally efficiently but are also able to route externally when the need arises.
this is literally how distributed systems are scaled, internet being the largest one.
it would be centralized if nobody could use LN if some one or two largest nodes failed, but the protocol is open and everybody can open a channel with everybody else and nodes in the middle have no way to censor traffic because they don't know neither the sender nor the receiver.
removing any big LN node will cause disruption only to the channels directly opened with that node, but will largely be unnoticed by the rest of the network.
so unless you point out the centers without which LN collapses, your claims are just bogus.
again: LN doesn't need to optimally solve np-hard or worse problems to work, good-enough approximations are easy to find.