My point about my personal preference where I employed the word "clusterfuck" to describe the hundreds of Cryptonote clones and that Monero's marketing (on these forums) to some extent had to vilify other CN clones in order to assert its dominance of CN clones
I can see why one might want to spin it that way. In fact Monero's dominance was largely assured by the fact that it was the first (even remotely) fairly launched cryptonote coin. The 82% ninja premine fraud was never going to fly. None of the others were sufficiently better in terms of features, leadership, community or anything else, to overcome that lead.
is instead I would have preferred to add features to CN that would naturally assert dominance over other CN clones.
Again, the dominance was never really in question, but it also isn't clear that "features" are needed (or at least they don't need to be rushed out in some sort of race) or that a feature war is that way to go. A large part of the user base simply wants a non-transparent blockchain with a credibly reviewed, sufficiently refined, and well maintained (and therefore for these three reasons relatively secure and stable) code base.
It would behove Monero to be the first CN coin to apply my suggested fix to insure combinatorial analysis of partially overlapping rings can't occur
There is an ongoing question (requiring actually analysis and research, not just forum posts) whether this change to the privacy model is needed or desired. It is being considered.