I "joined Bitcoin" in 2015. In 2017, blocks were full for the first time, which lead to very high transaction fees. That was 6.5 years ago. I'd love to see an actively used second layer solution, but it's taking too long.
Yes, it does. In 2017, people started working on lightning, because they thought it'd incentivize everyone to use it for instant, cheap micro-transactions over on-chain means. And it does work, to an extent, but they didn't think it'd be very unappealing to use for the average user. Now people want to implement other second-layers, some of which will be independent with optional lightning support.
This is a free market. It's a matter of trial and error. Unfortunately, it takes time, because of two reasons:
- Softforking Bitcoin is an extremely slow process, and many L2 solutions require certain softforks.
- Writing code voluntarily takes time. Even to Satoshi, it took 2 years to write Bitcoin, as far as we know.