So, I feel like I'm broaching something a little taboo, but I have to ask. It seems like no one really knows how slimcoin works, but every now and then someone buys a few hundred bucks worth of it. Why?
Why do people buy coins? Because the speculate on price development, because they like to play with their features, because they want to know how things work.
I have Peercoins, because I want to play with minting.
I have Emercoins, because I wanted to play with the DNS and PKI features.
I have NuShares, because I wanted to play with voting.
I
have had Slimcoins, because I wanted to play with burning - which was quite successful

...
Slimcoin is a great experiment. It would be nice to see that continued, which would be a reason for speculators to buy low these days

Ditto that. I've been buying the odd SLM here and there when the price is low, mainly because it's a really interesting concept and I hope to see it grow. And if it does grow, then the price will (hopefully?) go up... so kind of like investing in a start-up company in the hope that it will become popular. (And, of course, I need actual coins to burn in order to try out PoB.)
There are some who know very well how Slimcoin works - ask "Slimcoin" or a123 for example.
Everyone one who is interested and has the skill can find out as well - the code is open source.
That's what "Mr E" did and - boom! - there's another one who knows how it works.
Heh, I'm not sure I know
exactly how it works just yet, but the source code is right there, and there's a lot of information back in this thread if you have the time to read through it (look for posts from 'slimcoin', the original dev). The principle is not that complicated -- burn coins to 'buy' virtual burn-mining 'hardware', and then keep your client running to mint coins -- but how that interacts with Proof of Work and Proof of Stake seems to have caused some issues in the past.
Even in the absence of a main dev right now, I'm confident the network's stable enough to keep running as long as there are people who still want to run it.