The good thing about Namecoin mining is that is piggybacking on Bitcoin’s miners, something that was established in the beginnings as merged mining. For this reason NMC has a lot of potential in the sense that its blockchain is secured by BTC and so the price of NMC may drop without its network being compromised by attacks. The bad thing is that NMC has been kept in a closet for some reason, its tremendous potential has been hindered by nearsightedness, the current developer claims that only the functionality is important to him yet for many years I have personally seen no functionality, even to try it in the nightly build  tor browser is almost impossible. Mayor exchanges have been delisting NMC do to low volume and lack of interest, I have been holding this coin for three years also thinking about its functionality but only have seen my investment been reduced 10 times, there seems to be no limit to how low the price of this coin can go, something is definitely not working. If there is something in all these years I have noticed is that when Bitcoin pumps, Namecoin bleeds, and when Bitcoin dumps, Namecoin bleeds even harder. If functionality was the only important thing, then why not just create a non-monetary domain blockchain, its like saying that you only care about the functionality of your bicycle but that the roads you ride in are of no importance because they are unpredictable and irrational. There is clearly a one sided thinking at the core of this project that is driving it to its demise.