Monero has been used and proven for over a decade.

No one wants to switch to some unknown tech with an unknown development team.

How much of the Monero development team is actually known? Last I checked some of their core team were anonymous but that might have changed

Proven but pseudonymous, like Satoshi was.

Adopted and used first by darkweb pot dealers, like Bitcoin was.

Price supressed by government and banking hostility, like Bitcoin was.

known as in have a proven reputation / track record.

The latter is arguably the more important of the two.

I remember a scare some years back around a Monero developer that turned out to be a nothingburger, but it goes to show how important it is that the core development team is trustworthy, or at least sticks to their beliefs and don't capitulate to third-parties (whether public or private in nature).

Monero is the one coin I can confidently say I trust the core developers on, it's had a strong history of making the right decisions where it counts in my opinion (breaking ASICs w/the monero-classic situation, making the official client default to downloading the entire chain, etc)

Dero privacy got busted about a year ago due to developer incompetence

https://gist.github.com/kayabaNerve/b754e9ed9fa4cc2c607f38a8...

After seeing this and their weak attempts at making a CPU-based PoW, I don't have any confidence in dero or its developers.

Good to know. Thank you!