How do you evolve a public ledger that forever keeps a record of every transaction and must interface with fiat? Only a utopian dream might explain how that works out perfectly in the end.

True research is nothing but utopian dreams. Unfortunately we have stopped dreaming a long time ago.

The system exists, it's called monero.

You know that there is not a single monero mobile app that allows you direct access to Monero's node, right? It all goes through the servers of each app and those servers can all track you. Monero is suffering the same fate as bitcoin. Companies took over and they are not allowing anyone to easily play without passing through them.

Not true. Cake wallet, Stack Wallet allows you to point it to your own node.

Nah man. The dream is alive in Monero, which is why it's been deplatformed everywhere and the name can't be said in polite company. Inflation-proof asset was a great invention, and still has immense value. Now we need surveillance-proof. Monero does that. I get (disagree, but get) the argument about not adding obfuscation to Bitcoin L1. Fine. Let's have a shitton of DEXes and atomic swaps with lots of liquidity then. Ultimately it doesn't matter much if Bitcoin remains transparent if you can hop into Monero freely. It still causes damage though, because already now the transparency has been normalized. That's what it does. "Oh, hiding into Monero? *what have you got to hide?*

Sure. And how many people do that out of all of their users? Do they disable their offerings when you are using the app with your node?

I don't get your point. Would you rather remove the option and force everyone to run their own node? What a monero rpc node learns from you is very little. Your IP, nothing else. Unless it's malicious and drops your request after you submit a tx, then if you retry immediately, it can learn which of the outputs (the only one again repeating in the ring sig) was yours. And even that is going away with FCMP++.