........claims that only the functionality is important.........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 are many "failing virtuous systems" a phrase I coined. 

Traffic exchanges and safelists are a technology that has been around for about 25 years, and could be used as a grass
roots network larger than facebook, but very few have adopted them, although they are still actively used.

https://www.paramind.net/paramindtrafficexchanges.html
https://www.paramind.net/paramindsafelists.html

Those resources are not that current but about 80% of the sites listed are working sites.

Another virtuous system that is failing are the low cap coin staking wallets.  There were about 20 good coins/decent teams
that have essentially failed in the last two years, some of these coins were 7 years old (hobotoken).  They still are an easy
way to produce Bitcoin on a cheap computer for a low investment, but you need to know which coins are still alive.

https://telicalbooks.com/Staking_Book_RSPearson.html





Namecoin's main purpose is (unlike most other altcoins/tokens) not to be an investment, but to be actually useful as decentralised domain name and general naming system

It's not particularly surprising that newcomers to cryptocurrency don't have much interest in Namecoin.  Namecoin is derived from the culture that permeated the Bitcoin community in 2010-2011, which was a culture that was here for the tech, not to make easy money.  Today's cryptocurrency culture doesn't look much like that (sadly), so Namecoin is of little interest to them.  On the other hand, there's plenty of interest in other areas, e.g. in the Tor community.  Even a bit of media coverage now and then.

Real cypherpunks don't worry about whatever market fads are en vogue now.  Cypherpunks write code.