first thing to point out is there can never be monero lightning

You misread my response cuz that's obvious.

Ecash is pretty damn private and on par with Monero I would say (if not more so since there is no blockchain) when directly using it's tokens (not as much when making payments out of the mint over lightning). Except yea you know the big drawbacks with ecash. Can also do things that Monero can't like offline payments, instant payments, etc When used with your own node lightning has good sender privacy. Bad receiver privacy. And amount privacy is not guaranteed from larger routing nodes. Silent Payments are an improvement on on-chain receiver privacy for sure, particularly third parties, but your counter party can obviously determine what address it went to if they wanted and can follow from there if you're not careful.