‘Settle out in the middle’ means using the smart transactions bit of Lighting so that there’s no lending happening in the middle. Maybe you should learn about how technologies work before posting tirades about them.

As for your math, I can’t tell if you’re disingenuous or just stupid, but this is a very simple concept: The probabilities of different routes working aren’t independent of each other, because the target node will notice if they have no connections at all and form some, so if some routes don’t work that increases the probability of other routes working.

If you assume that peers don’t make sure they have connections then your math is mostly correct, but your claim is that ‘lightning network can’t work’, not ‘lightning network doesn’t work with this asinine implementation I came up with’, which is what you actually showed.