21 million, PoW, no premine, home nodes - Monero is PoW, had no premine and can run on home nodes. As for tail emissions, they are there to ensure that mining doesn’t exclusively depends on transaction fees, but since they are fixed, inflation still tends to zero. It’s a feature voted on by the community and, honestly, makes more sense than betting the security cost in the long-term entirely on transaction fees, just to be able to say “there will only ever be 21 million coins!”.
Defi, upgradeability - Monero has been constantly upgraded via consensual hard forks. More features are coming soon. It doesn’t make any sense to lump this with Defi, which is something that Monero doesn’t support on the base layer because it’s supposed to work as money, not attempting to be everything and the kitchen sink.
Massive L1 scale - That’s coming to Monero too, and anyway it’s not as urgent as ensuring real privacy and censorship resistance. It is hilarious that Solana has a check mark here, when it’s been down more times than I can count, not to mention the delays.
Privacy tech - The devs of CashFusion admit that it is not at Monero’s level. It is good for casual privacy, preventing a merchant from snooping into your wallet, but that’s about it. Real privacy cannot be achieved with opt-in add-ons, it must be a core principle, backed in from the inception and, without dismissing its brilliance here, the Bitcoin protocol simply wasn’t written with privacy in mind.
Proven hijacking resistance - Is it proven though? The community was split, BTC took pretty much everything, to the point that in most people eyes’, BCH is not Bitcoin, but just some wannabe clone.
The only cryptocurrency that has some chance of becoming world reserve asset (and possibly currency too, if the scaling issue is ever addressed properly) is Bitcoin (BTC). Now you might insist that BCH is Bitcoin, and that it has already solved that and other issues that still plague BTC: that’s technically correct, but you’re simply delusional if you think that some day people will wake up realising that BCH was the better Bitcoin all along and move en mass to it. Most people are simply clueless about how open source projects and forking work: as they see it, BCH is merely a Bitcoin (BTC) clone, a ripoff, if not a scam coin that piggybacks on BTC’s success. They don’t see its association to the Bitcoin name as something genuine.
The truth is, it’s only in your mind that BCH is still competing directly with BTC for the title of “true Bitcoin”. The market has long decided and has moved on. Today, BCH is just another altcoin, which yes, improves on the features of BTC, but just like thousands of other cryptocurrencies. Even if the market eventually abandons BTC, there is no real reason why it should turn to BCH specifically.
You say we need programmable money to build a better financial system than the legacy one. I say that money needs to be first and foremost hard. Programmability increases the attack surface and introduces malleability. Why can’t finance exist on top of a solid, minimal settlement layer?
About CashFusion, hold on a second: the devs themselves say that it shouldn’t be considered an “ultimate privacy solution” (meaning that it is a tool for casual privacy), how do the recently discovered weaknesses in Monero change this? Does this information about Monero magically improve CashFusion?
Besides, CashFusion cannot be on par with a real privacy coin like Monero for the simple fact that it is merely an opt-in add-on and, as it is always the case when privacy is opt-in, most people won’t use it, making those who do stand out like a sore thumb. Just a few years ago, someone on r/btc challenged others to trace the origin of some BCH after using CashFusion, providing minimal information: the challenge was solved in a couple of hours. If a significant percentage of BCH users actually bothered using CashFusjon, and if it provided real privacy, BCH would end up being delisted as well. It isn’t, because it’s not a threat.
I can buy the idea that the propaganda against Big Blockers during the Blocksize Wars might have been paid by entities interested in weakening Bitcoin. But the subsequent forks were due to rotten apples within your community.