I'm not very familiar with LN intrinsics but I'm pretty sure that Bitcoin's legacy protocol is not very "friendly" towards LN. For example, we needed Segwit activation to make transition to LN more smooth. There might be a lot of other roadblocks to its most efficient implementation. And if LN is actually the future of decentralized payments as many people claim here, why not implement it from scratch in an entirely new coin which would have LN from the outset, without compromises and trade-offs?
So does anyone know about any such effort?
It has been done a couple of times using a hardfork, but not much success so far. I think the greatest favor of Bitcoin is it's image, it has been around for a long time and it showed to be very immune for attacks. I would rather see a layer build upon the original Bitcoin, where the old system can still be used and that's what they seem to be doing now.