Namecoin has always been my favorite alt-coin - it had a clear purpose, different from Bitcoin, offering a nice way to keep a de-central registry of key-value pairs.
You found a bug that can be patched. Kudos. If there were an active development team, you would have alerted them privately first I presume rather than stir a panic. I do hope some developers will take this warning to heart and fix the problem, even if a bounty is necessary. Because like the OP, Namecoin is also the favorite alt-coin of many others.
OP contacted the Namecoin devs through multiple channels and gave them over a month to respond. They never responded nor gave any indication that a fix was being worked on. Project was assumed abandoned.