Bitcoin is a protocol and an asset, and both are close to impossible to change. 

I would be shocked if there was ever consensus on a base layer protocol change to add privacy features, especially considering how relatively mature Bitcoin is.

If that is a dealbreaker, Bitcoin is a voluntary system. No one will force you to use it.

I personally think problems with the current layered model or even Bitcoin privacy in general are greatly overstated. 

These things do not exist in a vacuum - compare them to our current financial system and you will see how incredibly superior it is. 

 Yeah, I don’t see a way to get base layer single user privacy without sacrificing auditability of the chain. 

But default privacy is more about the software written to use bitcoin. Wallet software some day will have coin join or something similar baked into the cake. 

 Maybe! You would need a way to coordinate inputs and outputs still. Coinjoins can also be expensive.

Most transactions won’t be done on L1, period. If we take that as a given, I personally think privacy on second layers makes by far the most sense. 

 I still think L1 privacy will matter. But it’s gotta be reasonably priced to matter. Otherwise only bad people will use it. 

 > only bad people will use it

That is the trap they are setting. How about: only people who deem privacy important enough will use it. 

 No. I really mean bad people are the only people who will use unreasonably priced privacy. 

 So for example, politically persecuted people are all bad? 

 It's looking more like btc got hijacked everyday lol 😆 

 This way exists. See https://www.moneroinflation.com 

 I’m not qualified to assess how or if the claim is true, but I suspect there’s a big trade off in transaction size. 

 its smaller tx size than making every spend a coinjoin on bitcoin,

and you are already trusting cryptographic assertions with bitcoin so it's unreasonable to protest the Pedersen commitments that hide amounts in monero.