We definitely need an active dev for this if we want it to succeed. With scrypt asics on the horizon, people are going to be looking for new algo's to mine with, whether it be CPU or GPU (also, there's a quark algo GPU miner that's supposed to become open source soon, wonder if it's applicable to this coin as well - edit: nvm, just actually looked at the hash functions, totally different).
Producing ASICs is a complicated, costly thing. It will be only profitable, when there is a multi-million$ market (like Scryptcoins are). Btw, there are coins with Jane-Scrypt, which can't be mined by Scrypt-ASICs, too. For example Yacoin or QQCoin. When there is a GPU miner for Quark open source, I think it is not sooo hard to do that for Qubit, too (but it's an effort).