Why would LN not work out as planned? Just out of curiosity, I'm eager to know where the BCash hope is.
I don't think the LN will work technically for two main reasons: (1) the high fees to open and close channels will make it too expensive to be practical,
There are two CoinJoin-like solutions being developed, at least one of which is at a fairly mature stage of progress, as I understand it.
and (2) there is no known solution to route-finding with a mesh topology so the network will have a hub-and-spoke topology instead.
No exact solutions in the sense of optimal, shortest-metric routing. A decent heuristic is enough to get the system going and avoid a hub-and-spoke topology. How does TOR manage to create circuits?
But let's ignore that for now and assume that LN will work like BS/Core expects. There is still the _huge_ problem that LN is a new network and needs lots of people to adopt it in order for it to have value. I think people think that when LN is "released" that suddenly all wallets will be able to make LN payments just like they can make bitcoin payments today. But that's not what will happen; instead, the first people to open channels will only be able to send payments to a couple of vendors and a handful of connected people. It will take years and years for the network infrastructure to get the point that Bitcoin was at 3 years ago.
What I'm saying now is pure speculation, but bear with me. All the users that whine about high fees should be able to put some pressure on vendors - and especially exchanges. I agree that segwit adoption is going slowly; but that's because few wallets support it. If half of the users had a segwit-enabled wallet, it would be much harder for exchanges to delay upgrading. The customers would flock to the first exchanges to adopt the new technology.
BTC is sabotaging itself.
It isn't. It's in a pupal stage IMO, preparing for the next metamorphosis.