>> The point was NOT to trust no-one, the point was to trust everyone, but keep everyone honest by keeping the ledger open and publicly available.
Trust takes many different forms and is not a binary function. You trust a surgeon to do an operation and a pilot to fly a jet, but not vice versa. To trust someone explicitly, you need to know who they are. Most social structures work without explicit identity and they still function quite well. For example companies are mostly anonymous to the consumer - if you buy something in a shop you trust a chain of people producing that good. A priori there is little reason to trust others, but rather that trust is already developed through social institutions. Money is one such institution with specific trust problems, and the history of money is indeed a very good way to study these problems. Unfortunately in Bitcoin development such insights are rare to find.
Lightning assumes explicit trust and ID - much like Ripple. That's not going to work, and I'm surprised that someone with basic knowledge of crypto doesn't see this problem. Having explicit counter-parties is something very different from Bitcoin where the entity doing transactions verification is unknowable and changes all the time. Users of Bitcoin trust nodes doing the verification because they know it is in their best interest to be honest. Neither Sidechains nor LT have preserve that important property, and so IMO there are no good proposals to make Bitcoin scale (if that is possible at all).