unfortunately, I don't have the chops to address the technical points - I never claimed to. And I hate to pull the dev worship card, but unfortunately those that really have the chops (xmr devs) are discouraged to respond, because they are accused of wasting their time and not developing their coin. So in that sense, this thread ran its course before it even started, because the XMR devs are probably exasperated with the cycle of providing critiques and then getting lambasted for providing critiques. Someone could probably index the existing responses.
Smooth has been responding, up until last night.
Fluffypony was responding earlier. He got it wrong about Darksend and for DASH in general he basically said 'I know it's flaky' but wasn't prepared to define exactly why, saying he can't devote time to it unless he gets paid. Fair enough, but hardly convincing.
Smart as these guys are I don't think they completely understand how DASH works, they just dismiss it out-of-hand because of an elitist opinion of the general architecture.
On the other hand, if you gave 1000 monkeys a bunch of computers with DRK / DASH installed, you'd have to get them to keep X amount in a cold wallet and make sure their masternode was secure etc etc.
For me, this is the essence of cryptocurrencies - to remove the human element.
I agree with you, but when we've got down to the detail nobody has been able to say how masternodes present a realistic risk due to the 'human element'. A recent post from illodin asking what data an attacker would hope to get from a compromised node hasn't been answered.