Have you checked out the price of litecoin recently? It is now no. 3 in exchange volume behind bitcoin and ether because transactions fees are cheap. A $25 bitcoin transaction fee is only 25 cents using litecoin. Whenever I have to send a payment I try to use litecoin if possible until LN is working.
I think that it would be the best possible way here after to avoid such higher fee.Lightning ntwork is in its beta stage and we could soon hope for it to get activated.