What Bcash ultimately lacks is trust. No one trusts the competency of the developers. No one trusts Roger or the miners that advocated for Bcash. So what if LN takes 10 years? Bcash will not have earned the trust of Bitcoin in 10 years. Your merchant adoption theory won't happen in any significant way in that period of time. You are typical of the microwave society with little patience. Where was the internet 9 years in - January 1, 1992? It was a complete mess.
We will have to see about that. From my vantage point, I see a narrative being pushed that Roger Ver, Craig Wright and Jihan Wu are in control of Bitcoin Cash. But I know this is not true. BCH, like BTC, is governed directly by hash power and indirectly by the market.
Roger Ver is a big advocate for BCH but he wasn't involved when we were planning for the fork. Craig Wright is largely irrelevant in my opinion, I don't think he has any real influence. Jihan Wu has the most influence, but that's because he's the owner of the most-successful Bitcoin company and controls a large amount of hash power. But Jihan has significant influence over BTC too, which is another reason it will be difficult for BTC to raise the block size limit (Jihan and the miners can prevent it).
There are lots of great developers working on BCH and in the technical and academic communities this is known. Furthermore, developers are not tied to a particular blockchain. As BCH grows, more and more developers will be attracted to work on it. On the other hand, right now, BTC is losing developers...
So I think the narrative can flip very quickly and suddenly BCH will be recognized just as "Bitcoin" and it will carry all the same trust that Bitcoin had prior to the blockchain split. But now it will have huge scaling capacity to meet the demands of new users as we grow BCH into a global peer-to-peer electronic cash system.