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As far as I see from the github activity, now that SegWit is activated, the developers are putting much more effort to finishing.

Anyways you're right that maybe I was a bit too optimistic. Bitcoin is getting popular as a store of value faster than it can handle the scale of being an easy-to-use currency. The blocksize drama will probably keep on going :(

What does SW activation have to do with it? Why not have it ready to go, wait for the flip, enable. Or deploy it on a testnet. Or on LTC?

People weren't even sure if SW was going to activate. Who wants to do a lot of work on a system (LN) that might not ever be usable?

LN is actively being worked on, looking pretty good, and is estimated to be about a year from production. And that's just simple LN.

Over the next 5 years LN has the potential to really explode in capability and capacity.

Indeed. The "18 months out" timeline has been around since the first draft of the Lightning Network paper, well over two years ago.