Glad we agree on so much but you're missing the point. 

Friends and family are bad custodians. Bitcoin miners are better custodians (dynamic and annonymous so very hard for governments to pressure, incentive aligned with Bitcoin, etc. )

Privacy on a chaumian mint is comparable to a zcash sidechain but the zcash sidechain also protects users from the custodians ibflating the supply. So the sidechain is strictly better. 

We have millions of dollars and tons of smart young people (fedimint bros) working on a worse tool and telling their followers that an opt-in softfork that enables a zcash drivechain is "dangerous" because "shitcoins on bitcoin" or "changes incentives". This is a problem. 

That being said, I don't think working on fedimints is bad or anything, we should have as many solutions as we possibly can and let the best one win.