I learned a hell of a lot during this process. I am the kind of guy who always shows up at the airport or at meetings early, so I was stressing about this months ago. I'm glad I did. Early on I played around with zapping from an experimental wallet created by @supertestnet, which, with his help, taught me a little about NWC, ecash, and the limitations of LN. Same with @justin_shocknet and his Shockwallet. I have run my own node for a few years now, but I was still no expert. I learned to really appreciate the value of your own node. I read about how important it was, but there's nothing like hands on experience. I was lucky in that I opened a few big channels (@DarthCoin's good advice) when bitcoin was cheap, so I did a submarine swap or two and opened a nice channel to SN. It really is the way to go, although I stumbled upon it by dumb luck. I was spared the difficulty of unexpected channel closures and other LN quirks that stackers had to live with, since I dealt with that a few years ago. What really sticks out is that I learned about the potential for NWC, which I think is just beginning.

Overall, I know more about bitcoin and the LN than I would have if SN hadn't challenged me.

One more thing. I have to disagree with Darth on this: @k00b has big balls