seems no one is denying blockstreams has ties to banks
Huh? I do. What ties to what banks are you talking about?
seems no one denies that blockstream prefer people not to use real secure bitcoin ledger transactions and instead want people using less distributed less secure LN hubs.
I do. What is a "LN hub"? If you're talking about lightning, every lightning transaction is a "real bitcoin ledger transaction" just most are hopefully superseded before they hit the blockchain, without degrading their security. If this seems impossible to you should checkout
cut-through transactions as a parallel technology that might open your eyes.
In my vision of lightning there isn't much in the way of hubs, but a mesh of users. If I wanted to build a hub I'd build a chaumanian cash bank. Payment channels were originally proposed by Bitcoin's creator, and the Bitcoin transaction format has specific affordances to support them (e.g. sequence numbers).