"A straight clone" it's called a fork mate. 
And yes as you said, they are implementing new things that are not planned in XMR and who will improve privacy. What about AEON right now ?
You called a piece of shit a coin with 250k dollars marketcap, two months old with 4 active core devs (more than 90% of the coins), I wonder which one of us will look dumber in 3 months. I leave you there, sad to see crypto community is so full of hatred like always. Good luck with your investment too either way
And yes as you said, they are implementing new things that are not planned in XMR and who will improve privacy. What about AEON right now ?
You called a piece of shit a coin with 250k dollars marketcap, two months old with 4 active core devs (more than 90% of the coins), I wonder which one of us will look dumber in 3 months. I leave you there, sad to see crypto community is so full of hatred like always. Good luck with your investment too either way
There's no novel features now or in development as far as I could tell from asking in the thread and looking at the website. The things they claim to be implementing, multisig and subaddresses, are features far along in development from monero, and if I had to be I would bet sumo people are not working on an independent implementation.
The reason it's garbage/shit/scam/whatever in my opinion is the 10% premine. You can't have a currency that enough people in the real world (read: not crypto "investors") are going to buy into and use for transacting where one party has scooped 10% of all money that will ever exist right off the top from the get go. Even Bitcoin suffered from this for a long time and Satoshi mined his coins over years fairly, but it still took a decade of his stash being static that most people begin to assume they will never move. Huge premine = non starter for me, especially for a clone/fork with zero new features and zero public plans to even implement new features.
Aeon is moving very slowly, but it actually already has at least one actual technical feature that differentiates itself from monero - pruning mode, two if you count modified PoW. And more importantly it has a fair launch with a decent size community of supporters and miners.
AEON on bitrex is like BCN on polo ... will be fixed soon...in the next 10 to 20 years LOL. until we see it fixed - it is as well as delisted
that is exactly what is going on with AEON, bitrex delisting it so 400K coins there are gone. but on hitbtc one man owns more than 60% of the coins. so AEON is the shittiest of them all, pure scam!
you can see how he populate the market with false sell and buy orders in like 2 seconds, with some automated script, and then drops the price from 15K to 10K in less than a second. at least sumo coin has potential to grow, and it's alive and thriving, unlike AEON, which is only well for pump and dump, nothing more
And how is premine any different from that huge donation found the Dev holds to himself, - with bitrex gone, it could affect the market much more than 10% or even 200%.