My question for all of this is pretty simple: what exactly will MON do that we can't already do with VTC or any number of other coins? Basically, it's "get free MON while mining VTC", but the problem is that since MON is essentially free to mine it will always be worth far less than VTC. All you need to do to see what merged mining does for a coin is look at Namecoin, IxCoin, and DevCoin -- they have very high difficulty and coins are practically worthless, as you get them for free while mining BTC.

I think the ulterior motive is to do something to try to bring some value into VTC mining, and that's great. I'm still holding all the VTC I mined near the start, but I haven't bothered mining more for some time as the ROI is very poor compared to other coins. Best of luck to MON and VTC.