Phoenix removes almost all parts of a self sovereign lightning experience. I get it, they 'provide the best lightning wallet' at the cost of it only being usable with their node.

Meanwhile your node is probably always online and available to process the payments.

I appreciate the honest feedback and your patience/support, and I agree it sucks. Which is why we've been spending a lot of time on fedimint support. With it, casual low value payments/receives will be processed by a federation with no risk of channel closure or offline payment issue. Meanwhile high valued payments can come out of self custody. It works well, but there's not many federations yet. I hope this changes soon so we can have a good set of trade offs for different use cases.