I wasn't following it closely (and was a little disgusted) but as I recall, all lukedashjr did was mine for a while then quite and it had a devastating impact on whatever coin it was. Hell, the same thing could happen to Bitcoin without any attack if the price drops steeply or suddenly (but that could never happen, right?) and/or a few large clusters were molested. I'll call this an 'Invisible hand of Adam Smith lukedashjr Attack.' Maybe the adjustment algorithms have been patched up to preclude this, but I doubt it...such things occurring proactively seem rare in Bitcoinland.
Well, perhaps if by "mine for a while", you mean "51% the coin while excluding anyone's transactions from the mined blocks", then that would be pretty close to what happened (if I remember correctly).
I don't recall or never knew the precise details of lukedashjr's attacks. Mining zero-length blocks does shift the financial burden on an attack funder down to just covering the transaction fees, however, in the manner I alluded to in a prior post.
I would observe that if tainting is implemented at the mining layer, mining empty blocks would be an expedient way to assure compliance, and at the margins of profitability a little bit of added efficiency goes a long way. Not that there is much other than 'impurity' that precludes developments and adoptions which would dis-favor empty blocks though I'll admit. (So, if we see such efforts being focused on we might raise our eyebrows...)
I also observe that the mention of the NYSE and Singapore governments becoming involved in Bitcoin provokes a response in the community akin to the VE-day celebrations (here on the allies side of things.) Tainting would probably be a small price for the 'salvation' of mainstream involvement to most it seems, and there are plenty of people who are instinctively favorable toward existing societal norms and power structures. By all observations Gavin seems to be among these.
With respect to tainting, it seems that there are plenty of people including long-time and high level Bitcoin participants who favor it on it's stand-alone virtues. There are certainly some such virtues, but I see it as entirely unlikely that the effect would (or could) be 'stand-alone.'
-edit: likely --> unlikely