Namecoin is a nice alt which actually is useful. It is a shame .bit domain never took off. We need a cool site with a .bit domain to get more people to install the namecoin dns plugin.
Again - with all the squatting it simply will never work.
Those that took all the .bit domain names just want to get rich so they don't care about the success of the tech at all (in their mind they invested 10 USD to try and get 1M USD and if that doesn't happen they are happy to just lose the 10 USD and see the whole thing fail).
You just need to *forget* about .bit as that will never happen.