I'm definitely open to at least exploring other privacy coins

From the little research I did way back when I first looked into it, these were the things that made me skeptical about it and pushed me away (maybe you can tell me if some are false, no longer true, or lack context):

-Trusted setup

-Centralized dPoW notary nodes

-Proprietary Komodo dPoW

-Dev tax

-Centralized and targetable entity (The Pirate Chain Project)

-And honestly, not as important, but the whole pirate stuff seemed like a gimmick

Basically, in my view it was smaller Zcash, just with the optional privacy issue fixed (big difference but still many similar problems remained)