Because they sponsor development of “serious” cryptography in the form of Lelantus…
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Reuben from Zcoin here 
Not sure how you define serious but I think we’re genuine in our beliefs in improving privacy by dedicating our team to both developing, implementing and researching different privacy protocols. Our recognition of the weakness of Zerocoin and the use of fixed denominations in Sigma led to Lelantus research and development. We also implemented Dandelion++ and also funded research and implemented Merkle Tree Proofs algorithm. We had a rough start so it’s easy to discount us.
Back to the topic at hand, personally, if just for research, I don’t think a cryptographer is a must have but it is certainly useful if you’re trying to develop something different but it’s a mixed bag as rightfully pointed out, sometimes you hit dead ends. However, having a strong almost full-time cryptographer does offer of advantages when maintaining privacy protocols especially if it’s being actively improved or getting more complex.
For e.g. I think Monero Research Labs has contributed a lot to its longevity by having people qualified on hand to deal with cryptographic flaws or other vulnerabilities in a timely manner has been very useful for them. For e.g. the Monero inflation bug might not have been so easily found without MRL. This is of course on top of its various improvements and research in making Monero better.
Another very good thing about having a cryptographer on hand is that sometimes when dealing with cryptography flaws, you cannot trust external or contract cryptographers especially when the damage may be worth more than whatever bounty or amount you can give them. Although having them on board on your pay roll doesn’t discount this possibility entirely, a team under a full-time employ would be less likely to do this.
This is something I have first hand experience with and if we didn’t have strong cryptography people in our team, our project might be dead when Zerocoin was exploited which was a topic that I dealt with at Defcon at Monero Village. Monero Defcon27 Village - Sunday Livestream - YouTube
However, before this is embarked on, one of Grin’s beauty and benefit is that its cryptography is elegantly simple and combines both scalability with privacy. Solutions like Lelantus although they improve privacy, comes at the cost of some scalability and some additional complexity so a clear idea on what cannot be sacrificed should be spelt out and agreed upon key stakeholders before any research begins. Users having to deal with Grin’s interactive sending + a separate mechanism to mint+spend is a serious detriment to the user experience as well and has to be carefully weighed since different projects have different priorities. These priorities should be set out and agreed upon first before research is undertaken.
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The FATF travel rule does nothing to prevent privacy coins. It’s merely being used as an excuse by regulators to crack down on privacy coins.
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Great response! Will have to have another look at zcoin.
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