Ecash is interesting but arguably more for its ability to work offline and some unique approaches to privacy. But also like Lightning, scaling isn't just spacial. Executing faster is temporal scaling and frankly in many cases seems at least as important, especially right now. Keys are all well and good but if you're querying the network with an untrustworthy node (ie, one that isn't yours) a lot breaks down. When you and your payee see different data, what settles the disagreement? As for indications soon, no. The arguments if anything are to shrink blocks or otherwise remove the segwit discount. Also concerns that with block space in such low demand we may need to explore ways to keep miners incentivized. If there's any reason to expand blockspace it'll be far off in the future.

arguably because The Narrative for the last 9 years has been to move actual financial transactions to L2. That's where all the real effort of the industry and 90% of the social narrative in Bitcoin has been. if there had just been a block size increase and no huge push to make lightning The Answer, things would look appreciably different. I don't think it's plausible to argue that normies trusting a node run by Uncle Jim or a paid service is a huge problem, but that trusted L2 and L3 solutions are NOT a problem.

Oh, hosted lightning's a problem too. But that's being addressed quite well with Zeus, Blixt, and Phoenix. Adoption's not there yet, but Zeus only added the embedded node in the last year. And then there's Spark, which is seeing rapid adoption through WoS. Still has tradeoffs but I'd call it more accptable than use of a third party node. What the masses do with their coins isn't much my concern anyway. The scaling debates usually seem to suggest we need to get broad adoption so Bitcoin can be used as money to enrich the community using it. Experiments like Lugano, El Salvador, Bitcoin Jungle, and local circular economies beg to differ. As long as there is a remnant, as @Alekandar Svetski wrote about, able to maintain a liquid market, Bitcoin will work just fine. Those who don't adopt it will continue to be impoverished and likely gradually move over, or die off as breeding is beyond their economic means. Most people aren't using lightning because there isn't space on chain -- there is, cheaper than ever (or at least, the Satoshi era when 0 was an acceptable fee). They're using it because it's faster, more private, and arguably easier to handle addressing (though lightning addresses are arguably only about equal with BTCPay in terms of infrastructure requirements).

this seems like a reasonable view, but it seems like a "Bitcoin isn't going to be used by a large number of people anyway" view. and as long as a large number of people aren't using Bitcoin anyway, those people can run their own nodes what exactly do you think the positive trade-offs are, of using something like Spark as opposed to trusting a L1 node I mean? I'd suggest that people are using lightning because zero conf transactions were taken out behind the woodshed and shot.

L1 privacy is terrible. Ecash and other higher layer solutions provide more than just fast payments they provide a means to obscure transactions and break the kyc trail. In order to imagine a world where larger blocks are required I need to see sustained full blocks and high fees. We haven’t seen that or even been close.