I have a modest Dash holding from when Dash was a lot cheaper than it is now with the current price spike. I hold other coins too. What I'd like to ask is this -
Is Dash immune from blockchain bloat and, if it isn't, whether this will be an issue at some point in the future?
The issue with Bitcoin isn't bloat, per se. The problem is that Bitcoin doesn't incentivize people to run full nodes, meaning that once the blockchain grows to a certain size, it becomes more difficult and/or expensive to run a full node. It also becomes more time consuming to start a full node, due to the very long syncing process. Dash mitigates that with the masternode network. Masternodes are full nodes with a full copy of the blockchain. Since they are incentivized from the block reward, there is no problem getting people to run them.