One of the strengths SDC has moving forward as a new contender for a top spot in the anon vertical is that the codebase is much more mature than cryptonote-based coins, since there has been much more contribution made towards the Bitcoin codebase and as result the SDC codebase. There's also been years of commerce to test it's security. That's not to say in the future Cryptonote-coins won't catch up, but things like mobile applications and friendly UIs is something that helps put Shadow in the forefront.
You can't really have it both ways. If the anon stuff has been implemented from scratch, and if major improvements have been made to the Bitcoin code, then it isn't mature code. Yes part of the code is more mature than other anon coins, but likewise part of the code is less mature.
Although it seems from the conversation a few posts back that the anon part of DRK also isn't that mature, and likewise for cryptonote coins. They are certainly more mature than they were when first released in March, but the most recent major issue was discovered in early September, which wasn't really that long ago. There have been growing pains.