alt Hacker News> and I (and everyone else) wrote Zcash off in that time
Seemingly in the ecosystem you exists in yeah, but in the world at large Zcash seems to have at least 6x the volume. I guess "everyone else" didn't get your memo. Regardless, I don't really care personally which one is better or which one you specifically use, as long as what we say is being truthful :)
Are you referring to on-exchange volume of a coin that has pumped 10x in a few months? And it's only 6x the on-exchange volume of monero? It sounds like people still don't use it. If you look at the blockchain, you will see very few transactions per block (literally less than one per minute), so it seems the volume is almost entirely on the exchanges. It's probably people speculating on privacy for some reason, combined with some dumping of the pre-mine.
The majority of the on-chain use is also public transactions, so it seems the "privacy by default" setting doesn't really matter.