For Darkcoin, it's obviously the arrival of the Masternode phase of the coin's technical evolution and more long term, the adoption of the Cryptonote technology (I don't now if that's official or just an off hand remark by the dev).
Interesting. If I understand correctly, Cryptonote has been developed from scratch and is a completely different protocol. I would be interested to see how this is possible. Have you got the source on that?
Good post btw.