I think it's more useful to think of ZCash's featureset not as privacy defaulting to on or off, but as giving you the option to have pseudonyms.
If you were running a non profit and you wanted people to be able to anonymously contribute to it, but you wanted to prove to your anonymous donors that all of their donations were being spent in accordance with the goals of the nonprofit, you might use ZCash transparent vs shielded addresses as a way to create that division between transparent and opaque.
As for t-addresses having been default, that's a regulatory hack. Exchanges have a better shot at being compliant if they can use the chain as a source of truth. So t-addresses let them create a space where they can do that, and then you as a user can privately move funds out of the exchange's domain and into a black hole without having to get your hands dirty with some other exchange.
Yes I know that monero let's you generate keys for this on a tx by tx basis, but it's not the same. It's just different privacy properties with different use cases.
Monero, however, has the objectively superior CLI. It's fantastic.
If you were running a non profit and you wanted people to be able to anonymously contribute to it, but you wanted to prove to your anonymous donors that all of their donations were being spent in accordance with the goals of the nonprofit, you might use ZCash transparent vs shielded addresses as a way to create that division between transparent and opaque.
As for t-addresses having been default, that's a regulatory hack. Exchanges have a better shot at being compliant if they can use the chain as a source of truth. So t-addresses let them create a space where they can do that, and then you as a user can privately move funds out of the exchange's domain and into a black hole without having to get your hands dirty with some other exchange.
Yes I know that monero let's you generate keys for this on a tx by tx basis, but it's not the same. It's just different privacy properties with different use cases.
Monero, however, has the objectively superior CLI. It's fantastic.