It appears it protocol may be evolving into something more like Zerocoin.
Can you provide more detail on why you think this?
I am not a dev, but well written white papers are supposed to summarize the disposition. My take is from the language used regarding goals and intentions of each project. Cryptonote started with a Project manager over it's ring signatures and now uses an oracle. I'm not sure how they will handle bloating. Cryptonote claims to be no longer competing with Bitcoin and wants to work in parallel just as zerocoin does as well. This is a reasonable approach with an unproven technology. But Cryptonote seems to be testing the waters with altcoins. This probably isn't going to help them. Both are a work in progress and the winners will be the ones that integrate with Bitcoin. Zerocoin seems to have the edge so far.
My understanding was that Zerocoin hadn't been released yet and was being reworked since they couldn't get it incorporated into Bitcoin. Zerocash is their newest project. Are you familiar with it? Is this only a theoretical edge that you're claiming, given that there's nothing actually released yet? Everything about it is still academic.