I also find the split interesting. I'm most interested in how effectively public perception was manipulated with regards to the split and the reasons for it.
Bitcoin Cash exists solely because of the censorship on r/bitcoin and the bitcointalk forums. When supporters of a high throughput network were silenced, the exodus started. That exodus turned into the fork. You can read more about that here ( https://medium.com/@johnblocke/a-brief-and-incomplete-histor... ) and here ( https://medium.com/@johnblocke/r-bitcoin-censorship-revisite... )
With regards to lightning network, it was pulled into the debate as a deflection from the real issue which was that a few high ranking core devs (after forming Blockstream, a company aiming to make money off of BTC's "scaling problems" ) reneged on their agreement to bump the blocksize to 2mb with the passing of segwit. Those devs realized they could hide behind lightning network and make it's supporters think big blockers were attacking them.
The truth is, very few people in the big block camps are against lightning network. I know many BCH devs that would welcome and even contribute to a lightning implementation on BCH, which for the record would work substantially better because on-chain fees wouldn't make it cost prohibitive to open/close channels or provide liquidity. The only beef with Lightning that big blockers really have is that they don't see it as an alternative to on-chain scaling. This whole BCH vs Lightning war is just a false flag.
Also, while we're all watching the Coinbase IPO with great interest, here's a gem from the golden boy himself that is very much relevant to this discussion: https://blog.coinbase.com/what-happened-at-the-satoshi-round...