A perfect coin would need no marketing and an utter junk coin is 100% marketing.

So a person has to decide where a coin fits on that continuum to determine how important marketing is.

When a person looks at cryptonote generally they see a coin that cannot be used for transactions requiring some sort of easy public confirmation, in other words cryptonote is not useful for most transactions.

So marketing has either to be directed to the drug dealer / child pornographer / hitman niche or the coin has to be adapted so it can be used by other groups.

There is a person who was making a new cryptonote wallet for monetaverde https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=657820.msg8939469#msg8939469
He was looking for others to work with.

The big flaws with cryptonote involve flaws in the user interface, it needs an attractive wallet and a way to appeal to people other than drug dealers, i.e., it needs to be useful for mainstream transactions.

One solution, and I don't know if this is possible, is to have two algorithyms in the wallet, cryptonote and another, perhaps bitcoin or whatever. A person could choose which algo to use but only that part of the economy transacted in the visible currency would be public. This would give the coin an edge over other anonymous currencies and add some credibility to cryptonote which it is lacking. As I say, I don't know anything about coding or scripts or anything like that but a project like selective anonymity, if it could be figured out between the various people would skyrocket the coin.

It is not necessary that you abandon the coin if a new dev takes over. You have the experience of originating the coin, maybe switch from main dev to part time junior dev. If you still own aeon and want the price to increase it would benefit if you remained as advisor to whoever is responsible.