Lightning network may well be the correct path to take but that doesnt get around the problem that we have today, The mempool is huge and transactions are far too expensive and only getting worse.
This is getting worse because some miners have found out the perfect way to make money: spamming the mempool.
Knowing this will help knowing that increasing the block size will have basically no effect - the spam can cover that in no time.
Its no use lightning coming in and working a year from now when bitcoins lost all its value to a competitor.
The market doesn't really agree with you.
Im suggesting raising the blocksize to give us some breathing space untill lightning can be implemented.
As stated already, this will not fix the problem and will not really help. And may cause more issues too, although I am not technical enough for those details.
New poeple using bitcoin can already see its lagging behind and the only alternative if they want to do anything is to use an alt? Thats not great publicity is it?
It depends where people buy Bitcoin from. Many exchanges group the withdrawals in a way to reduce the fees and still transfer the money in reasonable time. My Bitcoin Card company uses SegWit for their transfers.
So the smart companies will survive well, the dumb ones will try to blame Bitcoin.
Individuals may have issues indeed, especially if they do small transfers with money gathered in time from small inputs (faucets). For them the fees will be unbearable too; they have to wait and optimize. Try to send 1000$ with WU or MoneyGram and you'll see what expensive means.