Indeed. You know, there are prominent people in the Bitcoin community that I admire and still support, but I'm baffled by their opposition to LN being a separate thing from the core Bitcoin network.
Anyone who knows anything about technology, networks, and programming knows the valid reason why databases are completely separate from the transactional layers of any application. Or how bank clearing houses work. It's really the only way to scale it properly.
Bitcoin, unsettling as this may sound, is very much unlike a bank. It was designed to be both a currency and a payment processor, i.e. A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.
Lightning is not a p2p cash system, but a p2p gift card system. One opens a "channel" and funds it with BTC. Think credit card that, instead of letting you buy now and pay later, requires you to pre-fund it every month, and then allows you buy up to the pre-funded amount. Why "gift card" instead of credit card, you ask? Because you can only use it to transact with a single entity, just like you can only spend your Starbucks gift card at Starbucks.
Perhaps LN can be viewed as the aggregating mechanism that makes micro-txs possible:
Bitcoin isn't currently practical for very small micropayments. Not for things like pay per search or per page view without an aggregating mechanism, not things needing to pay less than 0.01. The dust spam limit is a first try at intentionally trying to prevent overly small micropayments like that.
Bitcoin is practical for smaller transactions than are practical with existing payment methods. Small enough to include what you might call the top of the micropayment range. But it doesn't claim to be practical for arbitrarily small micropayments.
I can see LN being useful, but it's not a scaling solution.
Let's take micropayments (assuming that by "arbitrarily small," you mean sub-$2 now, sub $4 when the tx fees double, etc., but that's a different topic).
Why are micropayments useful? Let's say Google is charging me per search: there's absolutely no reason for Google not to tally the number of searches I do on their own database, and then bill me by the month. Is there?
So micropayments aren't needed for sites that I use often, but LN is utterly useless to me if I need to make a micropayment to a site I never visited - I'd need to create a channel first.
In short, give me some compelling use cases for micropayments which couldn't be handled simpler without LN. I'm sure there are many, but just can't think of them offhand.
LN is most useful for lager entities which hold users bitcoins, and move them on there behalf.
bitpay, bitfinex, changetip, etc..
will all be connected together via LN and allow users to move funds among these large site, in a cheap / instant / trustless manner.