Preaching to the choir.
I truly wouldn't be surprised if there was a under the table deal done between Jackson and Charlie Lee in regards to the merge mining set up. (I have no proof, but I was the first to tell Jackson about merge mining... 0 interest... meets Charlie Lee and tada... then puts distance between himself and the project.)
I sort of want to say "Well we weren't really taking direction from Jackson at that point" but that doesn't necessarily mean nothing happened (apologies for double negative there). FWIW I was backing merged mining in internal discussions for most of last year (coins remaining in conflict for mining power tend to end badly).
With respect to mining schedule (and I wasn't on the dev team when the decision to stick with the code as-is was made), it's very difficult to see Dogecoin having survived it's end of mining from December last year, with zero block rewards, either.