Might I suggest moving to a PoW/PoS system? Currently block confirmations are taking about a day or two at the current difficulty because someone with a rental keeps jumping on and jacking the diff up, forcing us who are consistently mining to bring it back to normal. A Pow/PoS system would help rectify this problem by keeping the blockchain moving.
Ive been following this project since it was ANN'd and I think it has real promise if everything is delivered. It could potentially hurt the block chain and cause it to grind to a halt if the difficulty was to rise too much because of multipools and such. This is the same problem Bitmark came across and failed to rectify in time.
SPEC still has a chance to not make the same mistakes Bitmark did.
Yes, we actually have plans to take it hybrid in the near future. The initial plan was that it would be done by the end of Sept. Its being actively worked out and I am talking with one of the best devs for the job in order to see it through.