I can empathize with your frustration, you being a developer of a competing solution.

A leaf lightning node doesn't really need velocity. Private channels can't even have velocity as no routing is allowed. My reasoning leading to the closure of my channel was rather specific to having that channel to my own node, thus being able to use all the allocated funds differently - while retaining a non-custodial mobile wallet using e.g. LNbits (although perhaps without plausible deniability of that wallet). Stating that end-users ought not run their own nodes is always just a sales pitch for something else - usually something worse.

My claims of Ark not being custodial came from the Ark paper, which clearly describes the ability to exit without the need of cooperation. This is basically what non-custodial means. Having read that paper, I'd definitely judge that the protocol described there is an L2 as well.

The paper was written by people behind Arkade. You seem to imply that Ark implementations do something else, which makes them "Trustodial" as a consequence. I'd be interested in some pointers to sources supporting this, as it'd be a peculiar divergence between theory and practice - a bit akin to claiming that lightning implementations do not support channels closures without trusting the channel peer.