With the onset of NFTs and shitcoins storing their data on Bitcoin's base layer (a very clear indicator that increasing blocksize does not solve the scaling issue as shitcoiners would just store larger and larger pictures, in case you needed another reason) people are looking to lightning, and complaining.

There are a few things to realize about lightning in its current state. The reward for opening a channel now, is saving on fees for the 3rd and 4th transaction you want to make. In this way, the fees for opening a lightning channel should not be thought about as fees for a single transaction, but for many transactions to come. There are many other issues with current day lightning though, and for that we need to look forward, into the future.

To me, talking about channel factories is beating a dead horse, but I recognize that many people who scoffed a lightning fees before as being too high when on-chain was cheap, might be unaware of them. Suffice it to say, assume 1 transaction on-chain is $100 worth of sats. A channel factory opens channels for many people in one transaction. So to the individual, assuming 100 people are opening channels, the channel opening fee is just $1. This is a simplification of course as a channel factory transaction will be larger in size than a normal transaction with all the Bitcoin scripts it needs to work, but if you want to read more, the bitcoin manual wrote a decent article on the topic: https://thebitcoinmanual.com/articles/btc-channel-factories/

So....there's other stuff too that allows for liquidity swaps without the current day "channel rebalancing" methods, but I can't find the source lol. It was a video from an El Salvador conference I remember but I can't find the video where that developer was talking about that project. So anyway, feel free to share the improvements you're excited about in the comments. You know me, I'll tip the ones I haven't seen before.