I have no clue why the (Monero) community and market cap seems so small.
Because it's a hand waving trainspotting exercise and not an adoption-oriented technology one. Try using it. (see 3 posts before this one for what a project that IS adoption oriented looks like).
By the way. A favourite 'straw man' in use by XMR bloat-holders is that the criticisms of obscure blockchains revolve around the ability to 'mess' with the coin supply.
They are not.
The first problem with obscure blockchains is to do with engendering confidence and integrity of the entire monetary ecosystem. Crypto's are attempting to be 'unbacked money'. That's a tall order. So if there's no worldwide, transparent, societally endorsed consensus over blockchain movements then you have a recipe for disaster - a confidence bomb just waiting to implode. All it takes is one dodgy wallet and a lot of rumour, then nobody knows what the f*ck's going on on that blockchain and everybody dumps "just in case".
How do you think bitcoin survived all its various hammerings and media shitstorms over the Mt Gox debacle, the malleability scaremongering, and the rest ? Because throughought everything there were 10's of thousands of people every day scrutinising
this type of publicly endorsed information, verifying their wallet balances from two or three sources, checking the progress of confirmations, squaring off balances between addresses and so on.
Say what you like about privacy, but if you don't have at least that level of verifiable transparency in an unbacked monetary system, you don't have squat.
The second problem with so called 'obscured blockchains' is that they conflict with traditional age-old distinction between cash and credit. These are two well understood, forms of exchange who's priorities and properties are almost mutually exlusive.
Cash is fungible, anonymous and public (i.e. it's out in the open' not managed behind closed doors by a trusted third party)
Credit is not fungible , not anonymous and therefore needs to be kept private (managed behind closed doors by a trusted third party)
Crypto is a peer-to-peer monetary medium. It therefore needs to adopt the cash model, not the credit one and so the anonymous, publicy accountable blockchain applies. In that context, confidence and value are maximised by supporting the levels of transparency that bitcoin has, and transaction privacy derives from the inability of observers to make much of a distinction between the coins at one address and those at another.
See
here for more info. (And
here).