The advantage of bitcoin is that it's censorship resistant and descentralised.
I don't know of any other knock off cryptocurrency that does fulfill these two aspects.
You need an on chain transaction to create a LN payment channel. And if you only create one payment channel, you are highly dependent on the one peer you connect to, and reveal your entire transaction graph to that peer and the nodes the peer is connected to.
To get decentralized permissionless-ness and privacy, you need many channels. And you need a lot BTC to put in all of these channels, as the LN depends on BTC (or ETH or whatever cryptocurrency you're transferring) equaling the maximum amount you may want to send in any one transaction being locked up in the channel.
With transaction fees exceeding $15, Bitcoin is already unusable for the majority of the world's population, even with the Lightning Network, and even if each user only creates one payment channel.
I would say that Bitcoin is entering phase 3 of its lifespan, having just "rounded the bend" of its money creation curve. 75% of the Bitcoin that will ever exist are already in circulation.
Growth of the supply has slowed dramatically. Even if lightning networks can address the issue of transaction fees (and I'm doubtful), that will not solve the deflation issue, where actually obtaining a usable amount of bitcoin will be increasingly difficult. Due to the semi-anonymous nature of wallets, it's impossible to know for sure what the wealth distribution of bitcoin looks like, but estimates I've seen suggest that the disparities look something like North Korea.
BitMEX Research continues to do very smart and sophisticated observations in the crypto space.
Regarding your question you might want to have a look at
this specific blog entry
https://blog.bitmex.com/value_proposition/
