Yea tough needle to thread, a lot of terms came out of attempting to automate things with the intent the user doesn't need to know, but I think have made it worse since the trade-offs of each are suboptimal in power-user scenarios such as this.

When automation is not implied I try to use the term of re-usable transactions, because that's really the essence of Lightning, so power users should eschew all the automated terms and just treat channels accordingly, as re-usable chain transactions.

I may need to commission an infographic-y video thats digestible in 90 seconds or so just to give people a baseline mental model since everyone else hits them with a firehose.