Yea that's terrible engineering, a payments protocol should not conflate with a reputation graph nor a bulletin board. It's bad enough the network had to be bootstrapped with channel gossip, that should have been done at the application level too and could have been had something like Nostr existed at the time.

Can't be the native money of the internet without HTTP, where would Lightning be without LNURL/Lightning Address/Nostr?

Bolt12 is equally ridiculous by trying to turn Lightning into another Tor for arbitrary data. CLINK by using Nostr is the way.

In an ideal end-state, LSP's go away completely, and your channels are optimized organically through your actual economic activity.

This is also why I tell anyone thinking about setting up a "routing" node they have a fundamental misunderstanding of what Lightning is and how it works, there are no successful routing nodes and its a fools errand to attempt it. The reality is there are just other businesses with organic activity to their own nodes who's unique position make for being a net+ router.

Thanks for sharing your experience, more people need to understand that routing is unwarranted hype just like most of what gets peddled in Lightning.