I respectfully believe... that these things aren't that complicated. There isn't much... 'node configuration' involved? People just want decent money that isn't confiscated, censored, or inflated away by a central bank. In other words, privacy for better or worse for most people is an afterthought...

And while I agree that the 'opening transaction' is public... what happens within the Lightning channel isn't published anywhere. For example... opening a channel, swapping out through to on-chain (depleting the outbound liquidity) then closing the channel and discarding/donating the UTXO to a developer (LOL). Anyone tracking that UTXO... has nothing to go by? Your 'new' UTXO has no previous on-chain record right?

I'm not an expert on this stuff but there a lot of sophisticated tools that essentially accomplish the same things.

"Not to mention that if LN was a perfect privacy solution, I think it would be getting attacked more like Monero getting the boot from a lot of exchanges (the bounty to crack it) and the Samourai Wallet devs and Tornado devs."

I'm not sure that Samourai Wallet's privacy was necessarily that great... I think if those guys had not 'poked the bear' the governments wouldn't have come after them. They were really outspoken about just how much they wanted criminals to use their services.

I mean talk about post a target on one's back... what were those guys thinking?

I could absolutely be wrong (we all could be) but I am very skeptical that the declining block reward will be an issue for Bitcoin for a very long time. With ongoing adoption, large institutions, individuals, and even countries (imo) there will always be on-chain demand even if most of it right now is speculation/jpegs.

Eventually most of the on-chain demand IMO will be opening and closing Lightning channels in order to spend (or splicing channels to make them bigger or smaller) and the demand for this will be more than enough.

"5 sat payments aren't that interesting IMO... But Lightning's capacity for micropayments is a separate innovation that could theoretically be built on any base layer." I respectfully disagree... Lightning is doing something traditional payment methods absolutely cannot do and that's instant micropayments. Even other 'cryptos' can't because they are not proof-of-work so their tokens don't really count (my opinion).