I'm quite certain Robert has never tried to hide anything. TC is not based on Slitaz.
Same boot process? That surprises me, as I see much more influence of DSL and Knoppix than any other distro in there. And since I've personally modified a part of it, if that matches Slitaz, they have copied from us, not the other way.
The inittab can be found almost verbatim in a busybox example.
udev.conf is unmodified from a standard udev install.
nsswitch.conf and network.conf were from Finnix, and Finnix got them from Debian. So in claiming that, why do you not say Slitaz is not crediting Debian?
network.conf has since been removed as unused. For nsswitch.conf, you might want to take a look at LFS also, there's the exact same conf, only the spacing and comment differing.