It is quite worrying that such transaction congestion was allowed to happen even tho it was simple to fix.
I like Segwit and Lightning Network as solutions to the scaling problem, but if they knew that Bitcoin Core would not be able to implement even Segwit in time, it seems quite logical to increase the block size in the meantime.

It is simply not optimal to make Bitcoin unusable for a while, until the most optimal solution is fully developed. There are a lot of people over the years who integrated Bitcoin in their daily lives and this is a sort of a punishment for it, which shouldn't have happened.

I understand that some small portion of people might not want to update their clients, but the choice was either they will not be able to use Bitcoin or most of us wont.

There isn't any good reason to leave Bitcoin in this state for months until Bitcoin Core implements Segwit and they are planning to fully support it in May.
It just doesn't seem sensible to me.

It is my understanding that the network is ready for the Lightning Network with no further soft, much less hard forks necessary. The problem seems to lie on the software client, which isn't ready yet.

I have no idea how long it will take for it to be ready, but considering the silence, I think it would be safe to assume that it would be a while. I don't know why it's not being fast tracked either, despite the fact that it's likely to solve most of our current problems.

Lightning network are different people and have nothing to do with bitcoin core people. I hope you understands now.

Systems like this take time. It has to be carefully designed and tested.

No. What's a "lightning fix"? What are you even talking about? There's like half a dozen Lightning implementations in testing right now. I think some are already testing on mainnet. You can expect stable releases "soon".

I understand that Core is not developing LN and that it is not their job, but they are supposed to make Bitcoin scale.
If they put all their bets on LN then they are responsible if that doesn't work out.
You can't really say that Core is just supposed to kick back and relax if LN doesn't deploy.

I understand that LN is being developed (did some tests on testnet with it). But it definitely has a lot of critical bugs, even the most developed implementations.
Personally I got segmentation fault when using c-lightning developed by Blockstream. And fees are already way to high on Bitcoin and don't seem like they are going down anytime soon.

I still like these solutions, it is just worrying that it takes so long for even Segwit to be implemented in Core, which is their responsibility.
With Segwit we would be fine with fees until LN gets developed, but segwit is not going to be fully implemented in Core before May in v0.16.
So we have few months of practically unusable Bitcoin, at least. Which is quite of a kick in the face for people who supported Bitcoin for so long and tried to implement it in their everyday lives and now they are left without it.
So these people (everyone who uses Bitcoin regularly) suffer from taking a long, but still perhaps optimal, solution.

I am not saying anything against Core, they know far better than me about Bitcoin, I am just saying that it worries me personally that vast majority of Bitcoin users suffer from unnecessary perfectionism. And I tend to be perfectionist myself, but sometimes I have to fight it for the sake of reason and priorities.

Here is one thing that I don't understand and where I would love to have some honest clarification.

The current problem of Bitcoin is scaling. Too many transactions means too much time for each one to be processed, which also means higher fees because these transactions are competing with each other to be processed as fast as possible.

Two solutions were suggested: SegWit and LN. SegWit has been implemented in the protocol, but its adoption is still slow. LN is under development and we don't know when it will be fully implemented in Core. Both of these solutions seem to change the structure of the Bitcoin protocol: SegWit is a different way of coding transactions, LN is a side-chain.

Bitcoin Cash seems (but this is where I would love to get some more info) to have solved the scaling problem by keeping the protocol intact and increasing the block size. Bigger blocks means more transactions that can be stored in a block.

Has Bitcoin Cash found the solution to the problem in a simpler way than what Bitcoin is trying to achieve? (No flame intent, but just an honest discussion)