Indeed, I 100% agree with you. I wish more people would argue about these things using technical info and logic. I will say I've not been very impressed with the Monero people's responses.

Edit:

And I hope he doesn't straw-man Monero.

I'm probably gonna piss off some people but my main issue with Monero maxis is there seemingly complete lack of considerations of trade-offs around privacy vs. transparency. The second thing I often see is very limited understanding of game-theory, human psychology and economics. Its all about privacy. Privacy matters but market forces, economic theory, and game theory all matter and you can't have all of it without losing some of each. Its not nearly as cut and dry as people make it.

The layered approach makes a lot more sense to me. If you don't have what bitcoin has as its base value prop privacy is useless.