A few factors that may help to keep the project financially alive until it reaches its proper fulfillment:
a) Slightly greater publicity here, there and in the social networks/communities is needed. Less important rival projects survive because of that.
b) Better adaptation of the official website to the unexperienced users, particularly, of the wallet, etc.
Is it safe to store namecoins in the hard wallets, such as KeepKey, Trezor?
Agree on that. Definitely need some marketing, website revamp, make it more user friendly. And a lot of social media exposure.
While I'd love to see better public relations effort for Namecoin, our previous experiments with having technically non-proficient people do marketing on our behalf ended up doing more harm than good. So I don't foresee that happening again. Technically proficient people tend to perceive development as more productive (or just more fun) than marketing, so the technically proficient Namecoin community members haven't done a lot of marketing work. I'd love to hear suggestions on how we could do a better job on this.