Yes, I completely accept the idea that "it works / doesn't work" depending on your perspective.

Downloading Wallet-of-Satoshi and topping it up with sats and using that to buy things certainly "works"....

But from a regulatory perspective (and I hate saying this), but 99% of these things "don't work". Probably even SN (much less WoS) are in violation of money transmitter laws / kyc laws and could probably be shutdown at any time.

This is really what I meant by deluded. We bitcoiners are telling ourselves that "LN works" but what we really mean is "the way we're using LN has escaped regulatory scrutiny thus far".

My heart is on the side of LN self-custody and I really want this to work. But self-custody of LN seems to be very far out of reach. The thing that makes me sad is this is not the case where I have some "if only we could've done ABC"....I think LN was a smart solution (and maybe the best), but I think we need to admit that it doesn't really work.

I increasingly feel we need the "Satoshi of Layer 2" to arrive - meaning that Satoshi came out of the blue with a fresh idea on how to solve the distributed consensus problem that hamstrung ecash / bitgold / etc. He did that not by inventing something new wholecloth, but by cleverly combining existing ideas into a new workflow. I wish this was possible now, because I almost feel we've wasted too much time going down this LN path only to now realize its not really workable.....