The entire appeal of an inscription is having the data on-chain. Any other minting process would be unappealing by the nature of the proposed value-add to those in the NFT community. on-chain aren’t as big a deal for me since they are just low value transactions that help pay miners.

The Lightning Network also can’t facilitate this transfer because the Lightning Network does not treat UTXOs as non-fungible. The party you are exchanging sats with does not have to be a channel partner and a channel close would leave the inscription trade without the proper UTXO. A new system can probably be devised to combat this but I haven’t heard any proposals yet.