Also, if you want to make just one single transaction with someone, you don't need to open a channel, with all that implies, nor "hope" that the receiver address is in the channel network of someone that is in your network.
LN still remain the best scaling solution available right now imho, but user-side, I there could be some improvements.
I think this might be something the lightning network could evolve into since they want to allow people to open channels with just the normal channel things (and no inputs) but I think that's waiting on a fork to allow transactions to be made on the blockchain without inputs (I guess so you join a channel of dome one with one that's funded and then be paid by someone else).
Systems like these and the lightning network don't become that good fro throughput and scalability until companies and exchanges start using them more though too in my opinion at least.