I mostly agree with what you said. After all, the consumer market for anonymity is not yet rattled by the actions of the TLAs. This is one reason why BBR's emission curve is better than XMR's. No argument here. At this point at least, also taking into account the limitations of existing cryptos in general and CN in particular, our target is anonymous sparse transactions (such as sophisticated investors/speculators and other money managers with a pretty aggressive risk profile for holding, and private commercial entities for transfers).

I understand this is not your vision of The Anonymous Crypto and frankly is it not ours either. But there are steps to ubiquity and many barriers that have not been acceptably analyzed, much less solved. So until we have the slightest clue how to put things together to make a crypto system that checks all requirements for TAC we've decided to take the most advanced partial solution and try to refine it conservatively. BBR has a more aggressive approach.

We believe pruning the ring signatures is not conservative enough. We believe changing the PoW hash is not conservative enough. Any of these beliefs can change in the future.

I hope this makes it more clear.