I also was waiting for the GUI and easy mining, having briefly tried and failed to set up in early 2014.
I am embarrassed to say that I actually was interested in DASH (in early 2014) before XMR partially because I thought it was more user friendly and could scale faster.
Now that I am better educated I understand why their "technology" will never work. There are probably a lot of people who thought like I did back then and will switch to XMR as it becomes more and more user friendly. An official GUI and
a few high profile merchants integrating XMR will accelerate this process.
All of the btc merchants are also XMR merchants.