Government honeypot
I saw the "honeypot" aspect of it, but from a different perspective.
When an unbacked cryptocurency is publicly traded but cannot be publicly audited, it clears the way for all sorts of scams which can be carried out simply by infecting the eco system with everything from from hacked clients to bogus alarmism in the media.
It's a piece of cake to collapse confidence since there's no public consensus as to the blockchain state - each individual is "on their own" and even then can only inspect one address at a time with a private (or 'view') key.
There doesn't even need to be a "back door" because all a strategic attacker has to do is media-engineer a confidence collapse having previously "infected" the network with some dodgy software (e.g. clients that send transactions to a different address than the one you specified). The blockchain's obfuscation properties provide the perfect cover for the attack to remain....well......."obfuscated"
...for enough time to create fertile ground for the confidence "rot" to develop.
In other words it's the cryptocurrency version of the "can't audit the fed" scenario.
Then when defenders started citing "math" as the basis for its security I knew that claim was a scam since blockchains are not secured by math, they are secured by code which is not the same as "math". It is a particular coder's idea of math which can be anything they see fit to type out on a whim.
Of course all blockchains are subject to this problem, but the whole point of decoupling owners from addresses in bitcoin's original implementation was to engender a powerful public consensus as to the blockchain state to make it resistant to just such confidence scams.
I imagine the original designers of the Cryptonote technology must have known this which calls into question their motivation. (I'm not talking about current devs who I beleive are acting in good faith and truly believe they're simply creating a 'privacy coin' in oblivion to the huge trap they're walking their followers into).
(P.S. My own long-held theory is that the original designers of Cryptonote tech didn't intend it to be used for unbacked money at all. It was designed as a transport vehicle for backed money - or banks,
as described here - which is a whole different scenario. In that case no public consensus is needed because you have a trusted party prepared to convert your tokens to fiat at any time).
