While the "no funding" thing is in some ways a disadvantage, mostly due to the lack of funding, in other ways it's been advantageous.

Counterparty is about five months old as a project and we have the first functioning DEx as well as a fully functioning deterministic web wallet that was created in a few months, drastically increasing usability and it will be live shortly. That is great progress.

Burning bitcoins into a black hole is never going to be the most "productive model" because you are destroying value. You are trading monetary value in order to ensure risk and reward are both distributed as evenly as possible. It also immediately aligns developer priorities with every person who burnt a bitcoin.

The Counterparty developers are developing at an incredibly fast pace. Compare Counterparty's development timeline to other second generation projects. Five months in, I have no complaints. In fact, no funding appears to have had no effect on the project's development. The same can be said for other unfunded projects, such as Linux. Furthermore, too much money, too soon, can easily destroy a project.

Nontechnical people likely "only care about the price" when an altcoin does not have significant utility behind it. There are no apples to apples comparison for Counterparty because of the utility that the protocol provides. When Counterparty is easier to use, people will be buying and selling XCP to do various actions within the Counterparty ecosystem, not because of the price. Also, the recent downturn in market caps has largely been "industry" wide, from bitcoin on down.