[saurik]

So, the reason these systems use something like Bitcoin (or Ethereum, whatever) is because the goal is to build programmatic money, and you can build that on Ethereum and you simply can't directly build that on a "traditional currency" without first writing an adapter (such as some stable coin, as either a centralized regulated entity or as a decentralized protocol) to some decentralized programmatic system that you can then piggy-back on top of as a settlement layer.

The way that then, for example, (and this is really glossing) Lightning works is to provide a number of hypothetical signed Bitcoin transactions that rely on each other in a way where, if someone attempts to screw you over, you can put down one of the other transactions and move to a different state. You make it sound like Bitcoin is purposefully crippled to prevent this kind of performance enhancement, but one of the few and subtle big changes to Bitcoin was to support this!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SegWit