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The team probably factored in a few things when timing everything. After the brief dip in prices they did delay it some, but probably to launch when everything want dropping.
Privacy coins don't only serve as a means to hide something. There is a big difference between this and say Monero for example. The way in which privacy is accomplished with zk-SNARKs makes it's usefulness go beyond just trying to hide transactions.

In the future I think that privacy of a coin will not be used to hide things instead just an option for design of the cryptocurrency. For certain things you don't want privacy as it will cause more problems. For other things you will want privacy, it just depends.