I had a terrible experience trying out Lightning. Could you tell me where I went wrong? I hit high fees converting to Lightning, and I hit high fees sending Lightning transactions.

The problem with Lightning or Zcash is that it is not private by default. A private currency has to be private by default, with the option to share info on the transaction—that's Monero.

Lightning is centralized, Chainalysis supports Lighning tracing—it does not support Monero tracing.

You could get the same advantages of Lightning on Bitcoin by making a layer-2 solution on Monero. Monero beats lightning at layer one.