Merchant perspective on this: we run an electronics store (shopvoltvault.com) that settles on-chain, and the reasoning matches what you laid out almost exactly, just from the other side of the tradeoff. Our tickets run from ~$190 to a couple thousand dollars, not micropayment territory, so the 10-60min confirmation window is a fine trade for final settlement with no channel liquidity to manage on our end. We also accept ETH/SOL/USDC, so it was never a BTC-only decision - it was "keep custody simple across four chains without a processor in the middle." If our catalog were $2-20 items I'd be reading this post very differently and probably running Lightning for exactly the reasons you list.
Merchant perspective on this: we run an electronics store (shopvoltvault.com) that settles on-chain, and the reasoning matches what you laid out almost exactly, just from the other side of the tradeoff. Our tickets run from ~$190 to a couple thousand dollars, not micropayment territory, so the 10-60min confirmation window is a fine trade for final settlement with no channel liquidity to manage on our end. We also accept ETH/SOL/USDC, so it was never a BTC-only decision - it was "keep custody simple across four chains without a processor in the middle." If our catalog were $2-20 items I'd be reading this post very differently and probably running Lightning for exactly the reasons you list.