What I'd like to know is if you knew about https://getmonero.org/2017/04/19/an-unofficial-response-to-an-empirical-analysis-of-linkability.html before I made that post above.

If you say you didn't, I'd find that very difficult to believe since you say "Masari started off as a pet project to understand Monero's inner workings, but has turned into its own blockchain project." If you were working on it that deeply, you would have followed Monero activities closely since it, like most cryptos, has frequent code updates. That news would have been almost impossible to miss. It was all over here, redditt, coindesk...pretty much everywhere. It was big news for weeks and people still drag it up.

If you say you did know about it, then you'd know those issues have been fixed for some time, so why the need to make another coin to fix a problem that hasn't existed for the better part of this year?

There are no good answers to that question. It makes the project look either completely uniformed or out to get a fast buck. So does the premine.