I think it's worth paying the "genius" tax. Though controversial, the tax manifests in the form of inflation and will help fund a company that can get things running and stable.
Of all the qualms I have with Zcash, I think that their mining fee is one of the cleaner ways in the ecosystem to fund altcoin development. This technology takes a lot of effort, and a lot of salary money to develop. And then you have to do marketing, PR, bizdev, etc.
re: qualms:
- trusted setup makes me uneasy
- could have picked more than 5 people for signing party
- cryptography is really scary - lots of assumptions, lots of things that haven't really stood the test of time or the examination of experts
- equihash was a poor decision, and a confusing one given that it's pretty well understood that complex hashing functions are counterproductive (and we've seen this play out already for Zcash, things are just getting started)
- The 'slow start mining' was also a really bad idea, and I would almost suggest that it's abusive to the community. More than $100,000 of trade volume happened over Zcash at prices that are 1000x the current price of Zcash. It should have been easy to understand that this would happen.
Mostly, I would urge people not to use Zcash for situations that require real anonymity. E.g. wikileaks accepting donations, or routing around captial controls in oppressive countries. And this is because I do not believe that the cryptography will hold up. There's too much of it, it's too new, and it's too interesting (e.g. a lot of aspiring undergrads and grads are looking to make their mark on the world, and breaking Zcash would be a great way to do that). I believe that your privacy will be compromised retroactively, and not due to bugs but due to actual cryptographic breaks. And then you're back to the Bitcoin network where everyone can see everything, and you're vulnerable.