SDC is kind of shooting itself in the foot with the emphasis on the upcoming market instead of marketing itself as a unique anonymous coin. That's a lot to do with the members on this thread who are pumping the market instead of what already exists as an anonymous solution that can be used right now. It's like the good things are "coming" when they are already here.

Relatively speaking, I can't see why cryptonote coins can have >10mn in combined marketcap, and SDC only 1mn when it's based on the more compatible bitcoin code.

Cryptonote uses a different curve, different libraries, and a whole different underlying core.
We used ring signatures to spend Shadow, which is created by sending SDC as an anonymous output.
Our scheme is quite a bit different, in that we borrow concepts from zerocoin, with the minting and spending, and use ring signatures to make the inputs untraceable from the outputs.. We're also using PoS instead of PoW.
Its a completely unique scheme and implementation

That would be cool, but converting from SDC to Shadow is very lightweight compared to spending shadow as ring signature generation, signing and verification only happen when spending shadow.

I think the important thing to bear in mind, is that you have the ability to make your SDC disappear, or to remove the link between the coinbase / last shadow conversion

It is only a matter of time before people realize the gem that Shadow is.