Thank you to those who have contributed their time responding.  I am still reading and absorbing what I can regarding the off-chain solutions.

What is bugging me now is the question of why.

  Why is segwit not being adopted en masse?

  Why will people open channels and start hubs on the LN?

When I started mining the incentives were simple. Distrust of the financial system/federal reserve, and need for additional income.  I am a firm believer that parties generally will act in the manner that directly benefits them most.

The direct short term incentives for segwit seem to be a reduction in fees? Yet it seems like adoption is slow? And from what I am seeing there are arguments about LN adoption due to incentivization issues.

The incentive for retaining 1mb block size seems to be keeping the barrier to full node operation as low as possible.  The more I research the more I understand the importance of this.  So it seems that the issue is now a combination of the technical implementation of layer 2 solutions, but more importantly, the incentivization of their adoption.  For the same reason you don't want to just hardfork a 2mb increase and rule out the raspberry pi folks, you can't just FORCE people to start transacting on layer 2.