This is not an insignificant point. One of gmaxwell's criticisms of darkcoin/dash using coinjoin (which he invented) is that you can use coinjoin on Bitcoin. There are several different ways of doing that today, and if you use a few of them you are protected from the weaknesses of any of them in the same way that using multiple masternodes protects you from the weaknesses of one. Apparently there is a significant amount of coinjoin going on with Bitcoin right now.

Sure, this is maybe more inconvenient than using darkcoin/dash with masternodes and support built into the wallet (though I don't really know what people are using for Bitcoin-based-coinjoin so I can't entirely say) but the trade off for that is being isolated from the enormously larger set of Bitcoin users, Bitcoin services, and Bitcoin liquidity.

The point being, if you are going to use an altcoin at all, it better be one that is at least fundamentally different from what you can accomplish with Bitcoin otherwise it is mostly just a speculative trading game (i.e. fantasy stock market).

To be fair I think instantx, for all of its potential flaws, is a better case for this than darksend, and I (believe it or not) mostly agree with BlockaFett when he says that darkcoin/dash is abandoning the anonymity problem (or at least should be) and focusing on being a fast payment rail like Ripple. The reason is not even Monero it all, it is Bitcoin. When it comes to anon, darkcoin/dash just isn't differentiated enough from what systems (current and future) layered right on top of Bitcoin can accomplish, and never wlll be with the existing architecture.