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Marketcap is pretty much the only term you can compare the coins. Other terms are more "off-topicish".
Correcting market cap by helicopter money is not legitimate thing to do. Numberwise there are 6.7 million Darkcoins mined, and 12.5 million Moneros mined. Therefore it should be easier to increase the market cap of Monero than with Darkcoin.
There are simply way too many coins available for the markets compared with the rate of adaption, that's the issue why the marketcap is still pretty low. If 99 % of the coins were hovered from the exchanges, the price should be pretty inelastic to even tiny increase in demand.
For the market cap of Monero to increase to that of Dash this would require and increase of 3x-4x in the marketcap of Monero if we assume no significant increase in the market cap of Dash. An increase of 3x-4x in the marketcap of Monero is quite possible if the GUI and RingCT (currently under development) come to fruition without some unforeseen coin killing event. If we look at the market cap history of Monero the impact of the database alone is readily apparent.
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/monero/#charts. Dash has very recently broken its 2014 market cap high. What is interesting about Dash is that over 61% of all the Dash ever mined are tied up in the masternode network. Over the short term this can provide strong price support; however by the same token if there is even a small loss of confidence this could magnify a bear market. It would be interesting to see what the impact of Monero overtaking Dash in market cap would have on the price of Dash for example.