Thank you for the direction. I'm intimately familiar with BTS - I host a BTS wallet - complete with a faucet for new account registration, and am decently well read on Eth and EOS.

The only symbol you mentioned that made me wonder "wtf is that?" was XVG. I honestly do not see what it is that Verge offers, or even attempts to want to offer...
Looks like a clone of anoncoin from where I'm sitting. It's admirable that they want to make a privacy centric coin. There is nothing admirable about their course of action though: tweak a few parameters (like every other bitcoin clone), bolt on I2P/Onions, and call the result "privacy-centric." I expected to see the words "ring signature" or "zero knowledge" somewhere in that whitepaper, instead I found a detailed explanation of how onions route.

There is simply no way that bolting onions onto BTC's codebase can yield a significant measure of privacy otherwise absent, because origin IP of a tx is not where BTC has privacy issues - the bitcoin network doesn't even pay attention to nonsense such as origin IP of transactions, and simply proxying your wallet through onions will yield the same results as integrating it the way Verge does.

Move along folks, no innovation going on here. From where I'm sitting, all I see is a coin created in an attempt to enrich its creators. After looking at their white paper, I don't see the point in doing further research into very basic questions such as "was there an pre/insta-mine?"

If you need a privacy-enhancing cryptocurrency, there is no better choice than Monero (XMR).
ZCash had its trusted setup. 'nuff said.
Dash had an instamine which potentially breaks the privacy that is supposed to be delivered by darksend - since it relies upon the idea that multiple masternodes facilitate tumbling, and no one party would have access to that information, and the likelihood of one party running all the masternodes that tumble a given coin would be essentially zero, since setting up a masternode requires 1k Dash . Problem is - there were 1.5M DASH mined in the first 8 hours after launch. This suggests a high likelihood of there being individuals who hold enough Dash to Sybil attack the masternode system if they so desired.
PIVX is a fork of dash. It's distribution is more fair, but the privacy is based on CoinJoin, the privacy enhancing characteristics of which leave much to be desired. I've read a paper that described how to deanonymize a CoinJoin tx history, but my Google Fu is refusing to produce the paper I'm thinking of.
Bytecoin (BCN) - Instamined early on. If you read up on it, you will find it appears that the devs deliberately crippled the miner they released to the public (so that their miners would have an edge, I imagine). Additionally, the bug discovered but never exploited in XMR that would have enabled an attacker to print money was exploited in BCN.

Did I miss any other privacy centric coins?
The only thing that comes close to Monero in terms of privacy is Stealth transactions on BitShares (proper UI in the works). However Stealthed accounts can't use the DEX (only make transfers) and funds have to be transferred from a stealth account to a regular one eventually, and the pool of possible coins when you make a stealthed transaction is limited to the amount of a smartcoin that has been stealthed - whereas on Monero all transactions are obscured, and this is enforced by the network, hence a much larger anonymity set.