I regret to report that your attempt to avoid a naming collision failed. That's just a fact, sorry. Pronunciation matters just as much as spelling, perhaps more.
Well all this Cryptonote stuff didn't even exist when we came up with the name, we only found out about it later on after we had decided on the name. And I don't think it's really much of a collision at all. So what if it is similar, I don't think it's really a huge deal. The closest sounding name is cryptonight, but that isn't even a coin, it's just a PoW algorithm, so I didn't really care if it's similar.
MiniCoin was barely used in the past, and not being used currently. Based on your own criteria for originality and distinctiveness, MiniCoin is a better choice (IE does less harm) than Cryptonite, as it results in an order of magnitude less ambiguity.
I just did a search for minicoin and the old minicoin thread and the reddit are at the top of the results. It is simply a terrible idea to change the name to something which was already used. If we are going to go to all the trouble to change the name in order to avoid confusion, we must at least choose something which will indeed avoid confusion and not cause more confusion.
Don't let the search for a perfect (totally virgin, free .com) name be the enemy of a name like MiniCoin that's very much good enough.
I didn't say we need a .com domain, we need a .com or .org or .info domain, we need at least one of those.
We can easily ask our (handful of) exchanges to change the ticker to XMC, and make a new /r/XMC subreddit until we can acquire the full .com, etc. domains. It should be timed to coincide with the rest of the re-branding. It's not that hard; it's been done before.
Well it isn't that simple, and even if I was I wouldn't change it. It's a very bad idea to screw around with the currency code once it has been traded under that code.