I’m an engineer in crypto who has written and read smart contracts. And I can’t figure out how to get FIL on Filecoin Mainnet. 

Yea, we are not onboarding billions.

Chasing Curiosity. Pluralist. Empathetic Accelerationist. Founding Fullstack Engineer @icebreaker. YC S16, KB7, fid:66
icbk.me/tayyab.fc

fil is a bit different evm, I remember to had some problems to get a wallet too,
I think I have some fil there, hopefully it becomes easy to use when this fil become millions

Alchemist. 
Block Builder. 
Creator.
Degen. 
Ethereum dev. 
Farcaster Framer.

I need some FIL for something important like literally 0.5. Can I send you equivalent on a diff chain?

sure, just let me know an address, DC me if private or something :)