Well, as I told, Namecoin is struggling only due to the cumulative incompetence of the coders. Im gonna change it, and for sure I won't use any dirty tricks, just a honest work with attractive services on top of the blockchain, without using undeclared public funds bypassing the tax office, without listing or dealing with scam exchanges or explorers, without abusing the project for any hobby studies and experiments while squatting on the projects domains. Nursery childs have to stay outside from now on!
Namecoin, like bitcoin, due to its cloudy history is not a good basis by itself for a project that is completely above board.
A suggestion, discussed elsewhere, is to start with a clean project whose value nobody can dispute. An example would be an exchange listing science math etc coins. There are lots of higher quality math and science coins with sub $1m market caps because there is nowhere to trade them.
If you copy the old BlakeTrader from circa 2015 you could have a simple high quality exchange that would promote better coins and raise the bar a bit, as long as you ran it well. There are lots of people who are interested in coins, digital economy, and so on, but not interested in swimming in the sewage of the current coin economy.
You could add Namecoin as a base for trading pairs, and as long as you are upfront about the flaws in its history, and its inferiority to most science coins, you would get some traffic from academic types, college people etc, who might be interested in coins.