Dash is not instant when used anonymously (you must wait hours/days for premixing) and you rely on many 3rd parties; Masternodes/VPS companies.
The objective of Dash's design is to raise the level of fungibility of the coin supply as a whole without recourse to obfuscation - or put another way, without loss of blockchain transparency.
If this is indeed the objective, Dash is not succeeding without obfuscation. Darksend is all about obfuscation and people who never use it by default destroy its fungibility.
As such, the coin supply is being mixed on an ongoing basis - pre-emptively and post emptively. When you acquire any portion of the supply, it will have been mixed by pevious holders and the ones previous to them and previous to them. When you spend it, that portion of the supply will be mixed by subsequent holders. This ongoing, iterative process has an aggregate effect on the money supply over time which is to mitigate the significance of any distinction between one address and another, however, on top of all that, a holder can still target the specific portion of the supply that they control and re-anonymise that in background if they so wish.
The net result is a public blockchain, fully transparent currency who's level of fungibility/anonymity is way superior to bitcoin's and which can confirm almost instantly. That is the design objective and the basis on which it should be judged.
Except there is not full transparency, nor full anonymity.
Sure, at the point of spending, the receiver is able to know the sending address in the transaction and the payer is able to see the receiving address. But that is a good thing and consistent with Dash's design objectives which are to retain commercial compatability with bitcoin. From a monetary perspective, it's also not a bad thing because the transaction itself is the one place where you DO want to see everything since anonymity is then in conflict with other priorities such as accountability, confidence etc. This has been true for all historical base monetary media, for example no-one's going to pay you for your gold while it's under your floorboards.
The person receiving will be able to tell if the sender used Darksend or not. The gold under the floorboards analogy doesn't make sense in the context of crypto-currency.