So you might have just written out the only active developers of the software, may not bode well for continued development.
It is not clear there are any active developers at all. There has been very little done to the code since it surfaced. The relationship between cyptonode (publishing the papers and calling bytecoin their "reference" implementation) and the bytecoin developers is unclear.
No one has been written out. The original developers are welcome to join the Monero effort, anonymously or otherwise. In fact there is no way to know one or more of them haven't already. This is what they should have done in the first place -- viewed their unused and most likely unreleased coin as a testnet and relaunched it once released, not held on the 80% of the testnet coins and expect that to fly as a live network.
In any case, Monero is here, it is successful, and that has and will attract interested and competent developers. The forks of the forks will likely not succeed because they are not alternatives to an 80% premine. At most they are alternatives to minor launch issues affecting a few percent of the coins. That is not enough to matter.
You are certainly welcome to contribute, although in the end it doesn't really matter because useful code developed for any of the forks will be merged.
We can't really answer for the fact that the zerocash guys have an institutional effort behind promoting their work by publishing and circulating papers and speaking at conferences. How that translates in to exposure is somewhat subjective though. ZC may have seemed like a big deal to you because you are highly exposed to that channel. I hadn't even heard of zerocoin until a few months ago despite being somewhat involved with bitcoin since 2011 and highly involved since mid 2013.
We've done everything we can to get the word out about Monero, not just among altcoin speculators but to a wider audience on reddit, twitter, blogs, etc. It is
extremely hard to stand out in a world of shitcoins, although we are finally, it seems, starting to have some success in that area. And a month is still very early too. If the word is getting out now, I consider that a success.