Ahh, I see your point. If a person has open channels with insufficient inbound capacity, the customer not understanding their inbound capacity limit may be an issue of insufficient/inadequate documentation that can be read/understood by the 'average' non-technical user, or error messages that are not specific enough.
If you were to send that invoice to a business, the business should (automatically) be able to tell you what is preventing them from paying the invoice, in your case insufficient inbound capacity.
Which leads to more programming / work on the time of the exchange and more places for errors / vulnerabilities to come in.
...we can all help the situation by identifying nodes with low or no incoming liquidity, and providing it to them by opening a channel....
It really becomes something of a loop.
If I want to use my node a lot I have to connect to the larger more connected nodes.
If I want to help the network I connect to smaller nodes and then have to hope that through enough hops I get to a better connected one with more funds.
So I start by connecting to ln.pizza or ln.big and then work my way down.
But then I have to worry about how much
BTC I am locking away or opening channels or keeping in software that the developers themselves keep saying is beta and don't put a lot of funds in.
I do both. I have my "dave's private node" connected to some big liquidity providers and then a smaller one (not online at the moment but that's a different story) that connects to a few smaller ones and my node that is connected to the big providers. But, lets be honest how many people are doing that?
-Dave