Thoughts on Monero (XMR)?

I have been interested in XMR for a while now, just for a caveat, it makes up around 10% of my crypto holdings.

I'm based in the UK and it seems to be impossible to buy XMR with GBP. I've heard it's the same around Europe, governments are cracking down.

You have to buy another CryptoCurrency and exchange it for XMR using a swap site, adding fees and spreads to the purchase price. There's something called Atomic Swaps which I don't understand enough to use myself.

I've heard two different sides to the Monero argument:

1. Monero is a waste of time as governments are effectively trying to ban it, which means that it'll get even harder to get hold of and even harder to sell back to fiat or to use to purchase things. It's unable to scale to the level of transactions needed in order to actually be a good form of payment.

2. Monero is working as intended, the government doesn't want us to have it, so it must be good and actually is untraceable. The fact that massive corporations aren't buying it and pushing it is a good thing as they cannot control it like they can Bitcoin.

My opinion is somewhere between the two. The biggest factor for me holding Monero as it is the only crypto, other than bitcoin (and rarely Litecoin) that is actively used on a large scale to buy things – Dark net markets. Therefore at least for the time being there will always be a demand for it.

What are your thoughts for and against it? Are there other privacy focused coins that you hold or look more promising?