I'm still waiting for larger block sizes, or SegWit which could assuredly help on the short term
Segwit
is an increase in the Blocksize. There is no "larger blocks, or Segwit"
Miners, and all BTC developers should understand that BTC's growth requires a growing infrastructure and includes a growing block size. Visa wasn't able to handle thousands of transactions every second some decades ago, but Visa has good managers and they anticipated the growth of the network. BTC needs to do the same. If I'm reasonable, I'd say the block size should be increased 50% each year.
What makes you think that blocksize changes are the only way to increase the transaction rate? If you were reasonable,
you'd say that blocksize increases should be a last resort, and that anything else that improves the transaction rate should be implemented before that.
I agree with you totally because I am curious with what the Lightning Network can bring and how it will be used and what more uses can be invented thru it. I am also skeptical to the developers behind the hard fork. They might have another agenda in mind other than wanting to have "big blocks".
On LN, I believe there will be no official LN implementation and one LN could be better than the other. But what really intrigues me is how it can be used as a bridge to receive and send transactions to other blockchains. That would at least complement the exchanges.