although there is some overlap in the community, the Monero Team has no official ties to AEON.
Correct
AEON's hard fork to change block intervals was a testbed for Monero's similar hard fork.
That is quite true. The discussion on whether and how to change Monero's block time was informed by the experience having done so with AEON (specifically how it affected the level of orphan blocks and reorgs on the network), and also in identifying some specific issues with transitioning the difficulty algorithm (specifically the experience here showed that a special adjustment rules was not needed or worth the added complexity, and Monero didn't include one for that reason).
Also, while pruning hasn't been implemented in Monero the experience here has also informed development plans there in terms of making similar optimizations in the future (that would be even more true if the usage on this network picked up a bit showing more experience with the storage reduction in practice).
of a privacy improvement found and fixed by smooth for Aeon before it was merged to Monero
Very good point, I would not have have remembered that one myself.
Another one was merging that ip ban code from BBR (required changes due to BBR's own divergence) and making some improvements to it. That happened here first then was ported to Monero, the latter being more straightforward due the similarity in code.