Interesting ~ this probably sounds anti-privacy a bit for me to ask perhaps at this stage :-) but do you have a screencap of what it looks like (GUI) when this process (confidential transactions as described thus far in your post) is being done?
(Note: I haven't dug into Elements... yet. :-) )
There is nothing much to see.
You just have an address. You send coins to it. The fact that the world can't see the values is basically invisible to the user. Looks just like testnet. From the CLI you can see more.
Here is an example where I send 0.25 testnet to myself.
(...)
Summing it up, it really does demonstrably add confidentiality right now, and it can be done at this time. I'm curious to know only what sort of process would be logical to see this evolve into an option for Core (and ultimately other wallets) - I think someone else asked this in the context of the sidechain question as well (bitcoin core development track or be on sidechain)?
(Edit: I think you answered my question in response to someone else asking the same thing while I was typing this, basically it sounds like it's unlikely to make it into core in the near term if I understand it properly... it would need some further development and refinement and maybe, more acceptance from core developers?)