Yes, there exist harder technical challenge in designing systems with more privacy, and ECC has an incredible engineering team doing SNARK work, but.. You're d

Yes, there exist harder technical challenge in designing systems with more privacy, and ECC has an incredible engineering team doing SNARK work, but.. You're drawing a false equivalence between actual deployment potential in real systems, and the pure technological potential of ECC's code. At a technical level, both ZCash and Taler operate upon two databases, one for UTXOs and one for nullifers, and either could change their cryptography. If you compare design decisions more carefully then you'll find ZCash baked their politics much more deeply than Taler. Taler provides inexpensive anonymous payments for small everyday purchases. This is not controversial. ZCash employs non-scalable blockchain designs that cannot realistically support many small purchases, and even requires merchants track the chain, making it primarily an investment instrument. It's true one ECC dev has contributed to the scaling discussion, and ECC's code base spawned zexe and arkworks, which advanced zk rollups, but.. ZCash does not fund obviously much scalability work. In short, Taler appears focused upon real privacy needs of everyday people, while ZCash appears focused upon investors' privacy desires, including for for tax evasion. ZCash could engineer some taxation support system, although not sure about the complexity. Taler could trivially simplify their refresh protocol, which then makes all transactions become plausibly refreshes, and makes taxation hard. ZCash expressly supports hiding large balances, presumably from taxation. Taler could adopt a system that hides balances with range proofs, if they valued hiding large balances. ZCash like Bitcoin was designed to combat flawed government monetary policy, which weds them tightly to this goal. If desired, Taler could operate upon finality proofs produced by blockchains, thus giving supporting the same anti-governmental monetary political goals as ZCash, etc. Again, if we compare the political positions based into the designs of Taler and ZCash, then we find ZCash's positions to be more extreme, and to be baked more deeply into the design.