No, I don't think it's the price to transact that is the issue.

I think it's more about the EASE to transact.

Using Bitcoin on the base chain was a new skill that millions of people have learned to do. It works offline, just send to the recipient's address.

Lightning is 1000x harder to use. You have to be online. You have to open/close channels. You have to consider inbound and outbound liquidity. Then, you have to figure out how to connect your phone to your node so you can spend anywhere you go. Sure, LN works great when I'm at home using my node. But using it self-custodially, away from my house only works half the time. Sure, it's improved A LOT since 2020, but it's still unusable.

I have set up a few local merchants on their own, self custodial LN nodes. I have ended up being the manager and maintainer of them. I realized that it's way too difficult for the average store owner. It's not going to work in a self-custodial way.

From now on, I've just been recommending new merchants use a custodial solution like CashApp to take LN payments. It's just 1000x easier. Exactly what the Creature-from-Jekyll-Island wants us to do. And, apparently, exactly what Bitcoiners like @justin_shocknet want. Pushing people to custodial solutions, even though Fedimint is a great middle ground that improves on custodial LN, even though it's not perfect.

Layer 2's and 3's need to be as easy to use as the base layer. Otherwise, I believe, they will never work. Visa/Venmo/Fiat will continue to dominate. Especially sense Bitcoiners themselves seem too lazy to fight back very hard against fiat. It's just too convenient, I guess.