Those links were helpful. There are a few questions raised in the whitepaper review that I would like to hear opinions on:
https://downloads.getmonero.org/whitepaper_review.pdf

Quote from Surae Noether on pages 4-5:
My single biggest question after reading the entire paper is the how did they choose their elliptic curve constants?  The protocol appears sound; who chose the constants?  Will there be a plan for choosing new constants in the future if needed?

I know that Monero and Boolberry did not create CryptoNote but have improved on it. Any guesses for the reason the CryptoNote creators selected a relatively new cryptographic hash function?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Hash_Algorithm

I appreciate your thoughts on this and am aware there may not be easy answers to my questions