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.

The development of zcash is entirely controlled by Electric coin company, and they use this to control the zcash supply by taking a fraction of the coinbase outputs.

Even if zcash is technologicially superior, why not just fork it exactly and start over from genesis? Zcash is not the next bitcoin, but the next bytecoin.

Cryptocurrency needs to be a community-led project like bitcoin or monero.