Since you are using an appeal from authority citing your distributed systems background, could you provide some actual detail of the "obvious deficiencies" of the lightning network?
Neglecting the DS component, it just requires a lot of weird behavior like parking money in channels in order to send/receive money, nodes having to be online in order to receive transactions, etc. Why go to all this trouble to build a second layer when you can just use a different protocol? It's the sort of thing that makes sense only if you're completely wedded to BTC.
As a systems person you don't see any benefit to having different layers? Currently you are getting to watch the issues of shoving everything into layer 1 play out on Ethereum. Bitcoin isn't just a distributed system, it's value is derived from being a decentralized one.
Almost every technical aspect of Bitcoin that people like to claim makes it "old technology" or inefficient were purposefully chosen trade offs with decentralization. It's obvious that a single centralized database would beat every cryptocurrency on transactions per second.
