other points to consider.

namecoin has some competition, nxt dns system, and bts dns system

namecoin has only had 1 fork, huntercoin.

And what's to come:

Over the last two or three months, our very own lead developer was awarded a donation of F2pool(Discus Fish) to re-implement Namecoin onto the latest Bitcoin Core (see https://github.com/domob1812/namecore/ ), improving and updating Namecoin's very old code (from around Bitcoin version 0.3). This is now being used by F2pool/Discuss Fish and others.

He is now in the early process of doing the same for Huntercoin, so that we will be able to see those great benefits also.  This will also enable to make use of pruning efforts being made upstream by the Bitcoin developers.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=435170.msg10625130#msg10625130