The playing field is level, the code is all open source. Anyone who has the skills can currently fork a CN coin as has been done. The issue is with 100's on uninnovative implementations which is possible with "noob forking guides" and devs with no skill at all. Im sorry but if you think that 10's or 100's of slightly tweaked reference implementations is good for anyone then you mistaken. Yes competition is good and anybody who has the ideas and the skills to implement them will be able to do so already without the cryptonote team babying people to do it. This is why the motive question has been thrown out there and most of what drawinginthesun aludes to makes perfect sense.

 Perhaps if you countered the actual arguments you might have more listeners.

Drawinginthesun gives many reasons why lots of the same coin isn't good, arguments such as this "Only coins that offer a massive advantage over the other market participants should be able to take value from a market leader" and "However if Monero were to fall due to clones that offer very small incremental changes to the code, then I would be a fool to invest my time, money and energy into that competitor because I know the precedent has been set, another coin will be along shortly to ruin that coin, with small incremental changes." need more response than they're just trying to create a level playing field.