I don't know why it gets so little attention. IMO it's far more normie friendly than something like LND, CLN, or Eclair, because it's designed to be used visually with its integrated, excellent gui. The others have UIs but you have to pick one, and they are made by other devs with varying degrees of confusingness mixed in. Electrum strikes the right balance IMO: normies can use a standardized interface that looks nice and matches what they'd expect from a desktop or mobile app, and power users can access advanced features from the menus, or, if that's not enough, there are the command line and RPC options.
With the Electrum lightning implementation, is it reasonable to open the wallet periodically to check up on the channels, instead of having to leave the wallet running 24/7?
Most self-hosted lightning implementations seem to have the expectation that the node will run all of the time.
I have had no problems leaving it closed most of the time and only opening it up when I need to make a payment. But since I live on bitcoin and use it in several of my day to day purchases, I generally open it up multiple times per day. Electrum also has a watchtower option so you can find someone who's running one and ask them if you can plug their watchtower info into your electrum wallet.
Watchtowers do not have custody of your funds but they do have some presigned transactions they can broadcast to close your channels, and you're trusting them to do that if you don't think you can get online in time to punish your counterparty if they try to cheat. There are instructions for running a watchtower here, consider running one for your friends and having them run one for you. It is my understanding that if you don't use a watchtower, you are safe as long as you open up your lightning node at least once during every two week period.
If you only need your node as a wallet to pay sats from time to time, you can open private channels to some large peers. This way your node won't be routing other people's payments and it will be safe to shut it down whenever you like. But if you have public channels to receive sats or earn some routing fees it can be dangerous to turn it off. You must make sure there are no pending htlcs, or the channel will be force closed when one expires.
LND is quite straightforward to use with RTL but utxo and onchain fees management is not there yet. Is it something that also happens to you?
Difficulties I've encountered are:
no way to micromanage utxos
Very difficult to specify a fee for closing a channel. Most often the final fee is much higher that needed. Not sure if it's LND that has a bug or if it a characteristic of the lightning protocol where your peer can bump the fee at your expense to close the channel faster.
Neutrino on mobile, I have a slight preference for Zeus over Blixt, easy to use, portable and private channels, perfect for the average user that doesn't need to route payments
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