You forgot to mention that Namecoin is backuped by the Bitcoin Network via merged mining, and even if the mining profit for NMC is nearly zero the hashing rate is almost equal than BTC and thus unreached by any other SHA256 encoded coin,
check it against BCH in the charts (note that there are no other SHA256 encoded currencies available for a direct comparison beside BCH). The shown hashrates are Exahash per second (1 EH = 1.000.000 TH, current hashrates: BTC = 134.54 EH/s, NMC = 112.29 EH/s):

Seems so that the (mining-) community believes in Namecoin, and so one could come to the conclusion that Namecoin is the most trusted altcoin since the beginning of the crypto era. Even without any "dirty" promotion and even without any direct financial gain (for the miners) at the moment.
Thats true. Namecoin has more security than virtually any other coin because its security is never less than that of bitcoin.
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The most important thing though is to look at how the crypto economy is, and should be developing.
If you had no interest in coins and only an education you would laugh at people spending millions of dollars worth of electricity every day to produce nothing except temporary coins which will disappear eventually.
The earth has a lot of problems that could be solved by people incentivized to solve them. Things that involve scientific research on a vast number of issues which could be developed using non technical input from people who are not utter experts in a specific field.
There are currently a few primitive science coins that use computing power to develop sciences in a primitive way, but they are completely neglected coins because they lack a celebrity factor and any easily facility to be pumped.
If you are not interested in scamming then the best way to use Namecoin might be as a bridge between the scamcoin normal crypto community and the academic types who are interested in pushing sciences.
As long as you dont pretend that any coins that exist now are great coins, including Namecoin, it would be possible to push the ecosystem in a direction of higher quality.