You say "Zen is an evolution of the Zclassic codebase". Why did you choose Zclassic that is fork of Zcash? Why not Zcash itself?
Because Zclassic removed the founders reward in Zcash. The work had already been done in Zclassic. If they would have forked from Zcash, then they would have had to re-engineer the founder's reward removal. Seems like a no-brainer to me.