If there is something to be learned from what is happening to NXT is this:

Try and make the client as "average user" friendly as possible.

Besides distribution, the other thing affecting NXT is that the community seems to refuse to reach out to the average person.

The client itself is horrible for first time users and they have yet to officially release an all-in-one easy to use client.
I mean, you still have to use a really long password and remember it, average Joe gets scared away by this (one of the bad things of the cleint).

The marketing team is basically non-existent and the community is pretentious when it comes to non-tech savvy users.

It seems like NEM will be a really good competitor if it is launched and done right.

From the looks of it, everyone in NEM community is learning for the mistakes of other PoS systems.