Second layer goes completely against Satoshi's primary design in the first sentence of the white paper - which is removing the need for third parties. The lightening network design is a siphoning power grab by Blockstream.
After all, if you look at Bitcoin from a technical perspective the services Bitcoin offers are available in Litecoin, Monoero, etc.
We can argue about how to scale layer one, but layer two always provides scalability benefits that layer one can't provide. So choose your favorite layer one scaling scheme and then use layer two on top of that.
>Second layer goes completely against Satoshi's primary design in the first sentence of the white paper - which is removing the need for third parties.
Satoshi in the whitepaper proposed SPV nodes which introduce semi-trusted third parties for the sake of scalability.
Layer two does not introduce trusted third parties. It, under certain conditions, is less censorship resistant that layer one, but that is why you want a scalable layer one as well so that transactions which need censorship resistance can fall back to layer one. There is no reason to bloat layer one with transactions that layer two can handle. Layer two helps layer one scale.
>The lightening network design is a siphoning power grab by Blockstream.
Even if this is true, and I very strongly doubt it, that shouldn't influence your view on the technology. Either it works or it doesn't.
Payment channels weren't discussed in the whitepaper, but Satoshi discussed and attempted some payment channel designs[1]. He left before coming up with a secure payment channel design. Recent improvements to Bitcoin, including the transaction malleability fix included in the recent segwit upgrade a few months ago, finally make secure payment channels feasible.
[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Payment_channels#Nakamoto_high-fr...