Shower thought, are the Lightning Network developers trying to build something that a majority of people in the whole cryptocurrency community doesn’t want? It has been years and years of development, growth of LN is there, but merchants, services, especially exchanges are very SLOW to adopt it. In fact, almost non-existent.

No, that's wrong. Everyone wants or will want it, since it allows them to send BTC faster and cheaper. It certainly took many years to get to a well-working state; remember how just few years ago, everyone who was actually using it on mainnet was in the 'reckless club' and expecting to lose some funds sooner or later
It's technologically quite tricky and the protocol and implementation had to be thoroughly thought through and tested before the large audience could be tackled. It hasn't been until very recently that LN was really marketed towards the average Joe, so I am sure adoption will rise exponentially.

Merchants and services do usually offer Lightning; it's made very easy through software like https://btcpayserver.org/.
Exchanges not yet; I suspect to collect more fees. Especially when we see exchanges charging 25 bucks to withdraw BTC, while a 1sat/vB tx costs 0.08€ to send, it becomes clear they are making big gains on those withdrawals. If people ask, they just point to BTC and say it's because BTC is just so expensive to send, while it's not actually true.
They also simply don't actually want people to withdraw, because then people trade more, thus paying more fees to the exchange. And of course if holding custody of peoples' keys, the exchange can do an exit scam at any time. Finally, LN makes it easy and cheap to withdraw; both of which are quite bad for exchanges and also i.e. gambling sites.

I am sorry you got my question that way. You're right, I should have added more context, but I did say I am a beginner, and navigating this site, Github etc. can be difficult sometimes... I thought that this was the most appropriate place to ask such a question and thought that someone had an answer. I wasn't trying to inspire anyone to do any work for me. I have spent a lot of time the past 2 weeks reading about the technical sides of Bitcoin and getting myself familiar with the governance, and all the places where the community discusses technical details about bitcoin (so not places like Reddit). One thing that I found most confusing was the way BIP's are handled. I am still not quite sure where people have informal/formal discussions about new technical features of Bitcoin and where it is possible to follow them. The repo points to this forum and the IRC chat. I have been on the IRC chat for a few days and it is mostly inactive. At least, they do not have discussions about new features etc. I have subscribed myself to the bitcoin-dev mailing list as well but that seems to be the most confusing place of all. There is no context given on the discussions there, it is just a continuation of an existing one. I guess what I am looking for is the first proposal of the Lightning network. The first-ever place was talked about and proposed to the community. Is it on this forum, in the mailing list, in a bitcoin conference in the form of a youtube video etc. I have seen the Lightning Network paper, but there must have been some informal discussion beforehand I am sure? I tried looking on this forum by sorting posts with the most view and searching for posts related to the lightning network. However, I didn't have much luck. Now I am here asking anyone if they know the answer to my question! Thanks all for your help.

Anyone here want to share your reasonings about fees for your channels? At least the ones that still can manage them manually (like me)...

I'm looking to understand if it is possible to set a range of fees (base and ppm) for a considered "high fee" and "low fee".
Contextualizing, I'm playing a bit with the fees of my channels and I just don't know what to put in a channel with more incoming liquidity, that theoretically, we want to keep outgoing payments from going through that channel.

Is like, base = 2000msat and ppm = 500 be able to be considered as a high fee? What values hve you people been using for these 2 purposes (keeping payments from going out on channels with more inbound capacity and "attracting" payments to go through channels with lower fees???

Exact numbers of transactions can't be acquired, since it's an inherent feature of LN that I can send funds back and forth with a peer without anyone else knowing, as many times as I want. Some larger nodes try to retrieve information by probing other nodes in the network, like
1ML
Bitcoin Visuals

If you're interested, I suggest having a look at fillippone's great Lightning Network Observer thread as well!

McDonalds? Burger King? I believe I’m in Bitcoin Land long enough to determine, and say that the Lightning Network has NOT been plentifully been adopted, because simply, not many users are wanting it over onchain transactions, and there’s almost no high volume Bitcoin services/exchanges that accept it.

Here I think you're wrong, if nothing changed in the last weeks then we have the following popular exchanges accepting LN:

- Bitfinex (see here)
- OkEx
- Bitnovo (leading Spanish exchange)
- FixedFloat - Changelly-like exchange
- HodlHodl - P2P
- Paxful - P2P

OkEx and Paxful have added it in the last months, while Bitfinex accepts it since 2019 or 2020. There are a lot of other smaller exchanges and services, see this list (in Spanish) and this website. Kraken seems to be in process of adopting it, although I'm not up to date about the current progress.

Bitrefill also accepts LN payments.

Exchanges accepting LN will result in more traders engage in arbitrage, and I don't think will result in a lot more adoption of LN. Services and merchants accepting LN is what will really drive adoption.

How much volume of transactions did Lightning have for those services last month, compared to its onchain counterpart? Are Lightning transactions increasing, month by month, giving more reason behind the utility of the Lightning Network? Or decreasing, giving reason to debate if the developers are just wasting their time or not?