Glad you're posting here finpunk. It all helps.

I understand the tech comes first as it should, but in a market absolutely flooded with news, coins, projects, drama, ignorance and deceit tech alone barely speaks for itself.  Most people don't understand bitcoin, then most the people that understand the gist of bitcoin barely get privacy coins or care.  Currently we're left with a subset of a subset of a smaller subset as a base.  Some serious effective marketing and touting the WHY of the tech needs to be blasted out there.  No exaggerations, no BS pumps just simple explanations of why this project can be the best in the space.

Unless I'm just out of the loop and there IS a huge push planned to market once a soft re brand or jump in features happens something needs to be done there.  I understand not wanting to be considered a pump and dump. But there's an effective middle ground where hyping and spreading the word of real tech, real goals achieved and a realistic road map can achieve marketing goals without ever labeling the project as pumped.

Marketing needs to have a trailing pace with the tech to keep up with the market.  It will simply be too hard to leap frog or legitimately compete with older leaders once certain levels of maturation happen in the market share.  Gotta play both sides of the ball here.  Offense and defense.  

edit: even stuff like "Operation Radical Transparency" won't mean much if the viewing audience doesn't grow substantially.