Work on what by whom and to the exclusion of what, exactly?
I didn't claim the current work was to the exclusion of other work, just that a significant chunk of effort is being expended to make Bitcoin's protocol and the node software assist Lightning as much as possible, maybe more so than warranted. There's plenty of other protocol work like Schnorr, Taproot, MAST etc. that isn't so closely associated to Lightning.
It's kind of exhausting to deal with what feels like pithy narratives being used as a substitute for actual reality. We can avoid anyone feeling that way by being painstakingly concrete instead of vague.
One post in a topic that was a
random thought hardly can be called a narrative nor something "exhausting" to deal with. It's not like this is something being repeated endlessly by an army of shills.
BIP 118, which is over two years old (Feb 2017), has no activity in Bitcoin Core right now that I'm aware of, and was written by a lightning implementer. Lightning implementer interested in things that are useful for lightning isn't a newsflash.
Neutrino has plenty of activity on Bitcoin Core, the first PR was merged, and work is ongoing here to get the second PR merged:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/14121. It's quite clear the motivations for Neutrino are very Lightning specific, but that's no surprise as you said due to the Lightning team being the ones behind it. But if this stuff does get merged, despite pretty big opposition (
https://medium.com/@nicolasdorier/neutrino-is-dangerous-for-my-self-sovereignty-18fac5bcdc25,
https://twitter.com/lukedashjr/status/1105019080791244801?s=21), it will be yet another thing merged into Core with the aim of making Lightning easier.
And it's quite obvious to anyone that Neutrino is built for and designed to be used with Lightning:
I don't think these support your case, if anything they contradict it-- or at least the fact that these were your only examples does since they don't show a high level of attention or interest.
I provided plenty of examples. We can go even further back and look at things like OP_CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY which were something needed for sidechains and Lightning. The current eltoo proposal will require yet another soft fork of Bitcoin to function. Segwit was heavily connected to Lightning, with prominent developers like Luke-jr even suggesting to people
not to use Segwit unless they were using Lightning, so as to avoid increasing the size of the blockchain unnecessarily. Neutrino and all the BIPs associated with that are very obviously only designed with Lightning in mind. I don't doubt that Lightning's developers will lobby for even more changes to Bitcoin's base protocol should they want for more.
Lightning is an application of Bitcoin smart contracts to make Bitcoin payments more efficient, the fact that it could be adapted to another system is simply a product of other systems copying Bitcoin functionality... the same could be said for any technical functionality. Any application seeing actual use is obviously going to get some engineering attention, since a real application with articulable tradeoffs generally trumps conjecture.
Don't you find it strange how on Lightning's homepage the only mention of "Bitcoin" is followed up with "/Blockchain". And how their Twitter bio says "Lightning scales and speeds up bitcoin and
other blockchains.".
http://lightning.network/,
https://twitter.com/lightning. Lightning being blockchain agnostic is by design. There's no need for them to support Litecoin, but they do:
https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/blob/master/docs/INSTALL.md#using-bitcoind-or-litecoind. If Bitcoin doesn't suit their needs, they can and will pivot to something else, and all their marketing material is already preparing users subtly for this.
Considering your previous employer Blockstream is heavily involved with Lightning (I'm not aware of how much stock you own in Blockstream), your opinions on this topic are likely to be biased and skewed by your financial interests. That's OK because we all have some level of bias, but I recommend you divest yourself from technical debates where you aren't able to exercise complete neutrality.