I'm having an impossible time understanding how the IOTA project is viable. It aims to service the IoT niche. However, Bitcoin already is tackling this niche in a variety of ways. Let's remember that BTC has first mover advantage & network effect (should not be underestimated), as well as hundreds of millions of $ in funding distributed among projects aiming to directly/indirectly make BTC & IoT a reality.
Skepticism is always good. I have no problem understanding why you are skeptical or why you reason as you do, but I'll answer each point to explain our motivation:
Hi, I just wanted to thank you for answering my questions to the best of your ability. I did not get a chance to thank you, previously.
I still remain hugely skeptical, mainly because I think Lightning is being hugely underestimated. The Bitcoin community is pouring enormous resources into solving micro-/nano- transactions via Lightning & related technologies (Lightning is only 1 implementation; there will be multiple, competing, interoperable implementations with varying degrees of trust-minimization, and various ETAs). The peer review done so far has uncovered no major problems, and the timeline for LN is decent (I originally said 3 months for testnet; the Lightning team has just released an updated ETA of ~6 months for alpha/beta quality on mainnet!).
I also don't understand what you mean by fees not being low enough on LN. The LN's express initial purpose is to allow transactions of a few pennies (USD), aka by current exchange rate 0.0001 BTC. And, in fact, it's being designed to allow sending transactions as low as 1 satoshi (I have confirmed this with LN devs previously). This is impossible, unless the fee was simultaneously lower than 1 satoshi. In fact, the fee can be as low as 0.001 satoshis. They are actually subdividing satoshis by 1,000 in LN's design, since fees will be within that order of magnitude.
So, I'm curious what you have to say about that?
Regardless, good luck with IOTA.