Zcash is not a privacy coin in the same way that Litecoin isn't. In both cases, their privacy is optional, which is to say that when you need to swap it, your recipient will likely not accept the private version. Monero is a privacy coin with default privacy.

Institutional pumps and dumps are exactly the thing to steer clear of, and Monero is fortunate to not have become a huge victim of them. Monero has seen more organic growth.

Monero also isn't tradable on coinbase and is much harder to obtain or spend. Zcash has been pushing Zashi which will reconvert coins to shielded ones. They seem to be trying to take the issue seriously and help make this trivial for those who actually want to use coins as cash. Not sure it really matters for those who are just holding on coinbase or daytrading, as traders don't care about privacy and if you have a custodial wallet the custodian already has access to the sending and receiving addresses, significantly reducing privacy.

I'm with you, but it also seems like they have a better roadmap than Monero. If Silicon Valley can get monopoly status by selling things cheap and then jacking up the price after they have their network effect, why not get the coin embedded into the financial system first and then hard fork into private transactions only? Maybe it's not the right play, but at least we have people trying different things.