Yes, Monero lost a lot of value vs BTC over the last few years, but if you havent bought any XMR yet, now is a great time to buy while it's price vs BTC is very low.
XMR is the king of the darknet and agorism, and those markets are huge, it is here to stay no matter what. Its been considered the gold standard of privacy for a few years now.
Sure, I've already been thinking about shopping around.
That is great to hear, hope your crypto portfolio does well man. In my opinion, BTC, ETH, and XMR are the 3 coins that are almost universally recognized as having extremely high reputation, and also the lowest risk of ever dying. I suggest all to have BTC + ETH and/or XMR at all times.
Though there are other good coins as well, Haven is still small, but could end up growing to a huge project someday, it uses Monero tech for privacy to create the first private stablecoin, xUSD, and you dont even need an exchange, you can mint them right from within your wallet, so 100% no-KYC. A lot of coins are very low quality projects though, sadly...hopefully during the next bear market a lot of these useless coins will eventually die off and the market can concentrate their funds on the major promising projects instead of coins with cartoon dogs on them, etc.
And also it will be great once Monero has some less techie ways to do XMR/BTC atomic swaps, and once Monero and Haven are added to Thorchain, so they can be traded freely with no-KYC in a decentralized and free manner. :)
Exciting times for the crypto community though!