The symbiosis between cryptonote and bytecoin also draws my attention. Cryptonote calls bytecoin their reference implementation. Bytecoin code has crytponote copyright and licence at core, but there is no other public repository for the cryptonote code that I could find. My intuition tells me they are not the same person or persons since they seem to have different objectives by the artifacts they have published.
Yes, this has been mentioned before by Bytecoin devs and Cryptonote
"CryptoNote team was not interested in building a currency. That is when Bytecoin developers took the lead. They are the team of top notch p2p and cryptocurrency developers, which have been contributing to the sphere for quite some time. They finalized our cryptographic and currency prototypes and coded a beautiful solution to represent CryptoNote"